WAYZATA PUBLIC SCHOOLS: 14 WHS students win Scholastic Art awards

From Wayzata Public Schools:

14 students from Wayzata High School won Minnesota Scholastic Art Awards this year with seven students taking top honors.

Winning Gold Key awards for individual entries were junior Kaesha Baloch, senior Monica Mathews and junior Shaylee Russ. Silver Key winners for individual entries were senior Jon Ketola, senior Thomas Mann, junior Paige Rugland and senior Megan Sayer. Senior Yoojin Kim (pictured) entered her entire portfolio and won a Silver Key award for her work. She also won a $14,000 annual scholarship for four years from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD), which hosted the event.

Several students also won Achievements of Merit and include senior Anthony Duong, junior Adam Froehling, Ketola, senior Chloe McDill, freshman Kailee Olson, senior Claire Paskach and senior Jyllian Schwendeman.

The Scholastic Art Awards were designed to foster creative expression by secondary students and to recognize and encourage achievement in the creative arts by offering visibility and scholarships. More than 1,000 submissions were made to 16 visual arts categories in the competition which includes separate contests for students in grades seven through nine and grades 10 through 12. Gold Key award-winning work will automatically be entered in the national competition in New York, where panels of prestigious members of the arts and education communities will judge the entries for technical proficiency, originality and emergence of personal style or vision.

MCAD administers the Minnesota Scholastic program and provides an exhibition of all the entered art. The free exhibition, featuring more than 200 works, ran from January 23 through February 22 in the MCAD gallery. An awards ceremony was also held February 22.