Wednesday morning, inside the Leu Visual Arts Center, an awards ceremony was held for the Annual Student Art Show.
Around 90 students entered their work into the show showing off different skills. There were categories for photography, sculptures, digital images and more, and they were judged by faculty members.
“Their criteria were presentation and, in a lot of cases, skill and execution of the work. More of technique, you know, how good of a drawing was it according to their usual grading standards for those,” Jessica Owings, the director of the Leu Art Gallery, said.
Anne Brown, the director of The Arts Company, also judged the pieces. Her criteria on judging differed from those of the faculty members, however.
“The qualities I was looking for are the qualities I am always looking for in selecting artists and their work for my gallery. I look for the artist’s intent, presentation and overall ability to stretch the viewer visually. The ones I singled out met those standards at some degree or other,” Brown said.
Students with an art major or minor were the only ones accepted to enter their work in the show, but there is discussion to make an exception for that next year due to the skills of students that are not in the art department.
“It is kind of hard when there are students that are making really strong work in a class, but maybe they’re a music major or a theatre major,” Owings said.
This was the fourth time Owings has worked on the student art show, and she says that it had been held for many years before she started.
“I think it’s grown a lot. It used to not be a requirement that students submit work. Just in the last five or six years we started getting donations with prizes, getting it to be a little bit more of a scene kind of thing. They do a lot of hard work and they get some sort of award for that effort,” Owings said.
The winner of the Best of Show award was Autumn Horwath for her piece Evolution. In addition to that, she also won first place in the category of 3-D sculptures and ceramics.
Originally, Horwath planned on just making a bust of an elderly man when, while researching, she found that in the majority of the pictures she looked at the men had had work done on their faces.
“I began thinking about how instead of growing older being an accomplishment and a privilege, society has turned it into a negative thing, where people go to great lengths not to age; becoming these conformist generic beings. The piece Evolution is supposed to contrast the aging of a man with a robotic human form,” Horwath said.