Scholastic Art Award recipients were revealed on February 5, with five winners and eight honorable mentions from Shorewood High School. The Scholastic Award Competition selects student artists annually and recognizes them with either an Honorable Mention, a Silver Key, or a Gold Key for their submitted work. Two students won Gold Keys, the highest award a student can receive: Henry Agpoon, sophomore, and Cadence Olsen, senior. Three students won Silver Keys: Gray Hruska, sophomore, Indira Kahate-Desouza, senior, and Hannah Malloy, freshman. Malloy, Kahate-Desouza, Eleanor Bennett, senior, Maia Broderick, senior, Amaya Humphrey, senior, and Sidonie Stern, senior, received Honorable Mentions for their submissions.
Students can submit work in any of 16 categories, including mixed media, drawing and illustration, and architecture. According to Jessica Mohagen, art teacher, roughly one in 20 submissions receive an award.
“We’ve gotten a lower amount of awards than we typically get, probably partly because we’ve submitted a lot less than what we typically have,” Mohagen said.
This year, the website format has changed for how pieces can be entered, causing some difficulties navigating the progress of each submission.
“Anytime we tried to go on [the website], it just shut down or froze, or I would see that a student uploaded the work, but I couldn’t see [the work] on my end,” Mohagen said. “And [it’s] really helpful for me to be able to see what students uploaded.”
Mohagen encourages students to submit their artwork to the competition, even if they do not feel confident about winning. She requires those in AP Art to enter at least one piece.
“I want to provide an opportunity where [students]…put themselves out there and put their work out there so that they can see what it’s like to have that opportunity,” Mohagen said.
Olsen received a gold key for their illustration titled “Living.” The artwork, drawn with pen and colored pencil, includes depictions of several different aspects of life.
“I wanted to tackle the basic themes of life and the ideas that come with it,” Olsen said. “I tried to include aspects of relationships and moving on and how people interact with each other…memories, aging, and even just down to basic human anatomy, because that’s a part of life too.”
AP Art students must choose a sustained investigation that they intend to focus on with their artwork. This year, Olsen’s sustained investigation has the same title as their award-winning piece: Living.
“I have a lot of complicated perceptions on life and what it means to be alive,” Olsen said. “I think that demonstrating these thoughts through art and expressing myself through visuals would be an interesting way to explore that.”
Olsen has been doing art from a young age, and finds it to be a relaxing way to bring their ideas to life.
“[It is] my favorite thing to illustrate [stories to] relate and explore characters and their dynamics and how they interact with the world,” Olsen said.
With this project, as with every project, there were obstacles that Olsen had to overcome, especially given the deadline to submit their work.
“I did definitely face challenges…Most of my art takes a really long time to make because I’m very focused on details… [creating] something you can zoom in on and observe at a closer glance…I had to figure out how to overcome that for some parts of this project,” Olsen said.
Winning the Gold Key for this piece was not necessarily Olsen’s ultimate goal, although finding out they did was a shocking and joyful moment.
“I already felt like I accomplished something after finishing it,” Olsen said. “So if I didn’t win an award, I still would’ve been pretty happy because this entire process was a learning experience, but being rewarded for it felt really nice. I guess it feels like my art actually makes an impact and that’s what I try to achieve.”
In their artwork, Olsen doesn’t follow a specific pattern or genre. Instead, they try to experiment in all categories and learn from those experiences.
“I try to do something different with every single piece artistically with the messages and how it’s presented,” Olsen said. “I would say that the only thing that’s consistent about my art is the inconsistency.”
Agpoon received his Gold Key in the architecture category for his bass guitar design.
Agpoon was inspired by the designs of luthiers and has been playing guitar for the past year. He aimed to create a guitar shape designed to minimize discomfort experienced by players.
“I draw, I use pixel art and then I also do music a lot…[Art is] fun to do and it’s fun to learn how to do it. [It’s] also anti-entropic in the way that it organizes information out of chaos,” Agpoon said.
Agpoon went through many trials of making this project, spending a total of 15 hours to create the guitar design. First, he started off with a preliminary sketch. Then he proceeded to use a CAD (computer-aided design) program, Fusion 360, to refine the work and make-up the shapes.
His teachers encouraged him to enter the competition in 7th grade, but Agpoon did not decide to submit his work until this year.
“I hadn’t originally intended to submit to the Scholastic Art Competition,” Agpoon said. “[But then] I decided that it was probably good enough and original enough to submit. So I did.”
Receiving this award came as a shock to Agpoon, as he entered with minimal expectations.
“I knew that there weren’t that many people that had submitted for the category that I was in, but it was still kind of a surprise to me…I was super excited,” Agpoon said.
Agpoon is the only Gold Key recipient for the architectural category in this region, automatically allowing him to be considered for the national awards.
The artworks of the winners can be observed by the public in the Milwaukee Art Museum until April.
“I am very proud of all our artists and I think we do such good work,” Mohagen said. “I always get compliments anytime we show our work, whether it’s on our Instagram page or our shows. Anytime we can show off our work is the best.”