Archive: Around Town

Three Lansing High School artists have won national awards in this school year's Scholastic Art and Writing Awards competition.  Jedidiah Dewey, Lexi Ryan and Elsa Brenner's work will be part of an exhibit of about 300 works or art and 300 works of writing in New York City before going on tour in Scholastic's traveling national exhibition.

"I really think it's a great experience for the students to put their work out there and have it be juried, and get some feedback," Stratton says.  "It's amazing.  Apparently at the regional and national level they like something about what we are doing."

Close to 320,000 works of art were submitted to the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards this school year.  808 of those were entered in our region, and, of those, 226 received awards including 20 Lansing students.  Lansing students won six Honorable Mentions, six Silver Keys, eight Gold Keys.  Two of the Gold Key winners, Brenner and Caroline Taylor, also won two of the five regional Best-in-Show awards.  That put them in contention for national awards.

The region Lansing participates in spans Broome, Chemung, Schuyler, Steuben, Tioga, and Tompkins Counties, and Bradford and Sullivan, PA.  Artists register online in December, uploading pictures of their work.  Students enter their works online, uploading photographs of their work at the end of each year.  Regional results are announced in the first week of January.  Seniors may also submit a portfolio.  Lansing's Margot Miller received a silver key award for her portfolio this year.

Regional award winners were announced January 8th, and an awards ceremony was held January 31 at the Arnot Museum in Elmira, and put on display February 2nd through March 5th.
 
Initially Brenner's piece was to receive a regional silver key award.  The notifications are made after the judges choose winners based on uploaded photographs of each art work.  But when she went on stage to recieve her award she was surprised that she was given a gold key instead.  She shrugged it off as a mistake.  It wasn't.

"You can't win a Best In Show unless you are a gold key," Stratton explains.  "They had elevated her award after seeing her piece in person."

Five of the 226 student works won national recognition, one from Elmira, another from Horseheads, and the three Lansing High School students.

Dewey's 'Fire Pit' won a national gold medal in digital art, Ryan's Lioness won a national silver medal in photography, and Brenner's 'Sheep Dog' won a national American Visions Medal in mixed media.

Dewey credits his digital art teacher and fellow students with helping him as he worked on the piece, though Stratton says he is modest.  He worked on the photograph in Photoshop, changing hues to give it a spooky look.  A friend suggested he use an oil paint filter, which made it more mysterious.

"My Dad made the fire pit and the stone wall himself," says Dewey.  "It was mainly his vision.  I thought it would be cool to make a picture of it."


"I wanted to capture the happiness of dogs, my favorite animal," Brenner says.  "I do a lot of dog training and work with dogs outside of school, and I wanted to bring that into the classroom.  I had made a piece using yarn last year and I really liked the results.  I wanted the focal point to pop out, so I used acrylic paint for the background, and the tongue and nose in oil pastel and paper collage, because I am most comfortable in oil pastel."


"Photography has always been a huge passion of mine," Ryan says.  "I got into it when I was four or five.  My Dad had bought a little digital camera, but he didn't know how to use it, so I started using it.  I took a self portrait at the beach, and that was where it really started."

'Lioness' also started as a self portrait.  She cropped it in Photoshop and changed from color to greyscale mode.

"It ended up being one of my favorite pieces I've ever done and it won all these awards, which is crazy," she says.


This is the second year in a row that Stratton's students have earned national medals.  Last year was the first time since 2012 that Lansing students won national awards, when Nat Deis (silver) and Lydia Krogh (gold) participated in the national exhibit.  This year Krogh's piece, 'When The Bell Rings' was also chosen for inclusion in the 2016 Scholastic calendar, on the September page.

The three winners packed their work Monday to be shipped to New York.  The pieces will be part of an exhibit of about 300 works or art and 300 works of writing opening in June at The New School’s Parsons School for Design and at Pratt Institute’s Pratt Manhattan Gallery before going on tour around the nation.  Dewey and Brenner plan to attend the opening ceremony June 2.

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