Sara Stadem | Editor
Tri-Valley art students had success last weekend at State Visual Arts in Sioux Falls, bringing home second place in class A and several individual student placings.
State Visual Arts is a competition that was started six years ago as a way for student artists to not only show off their work but have a way of comparing their abilities to that of other students around the state, explained Tri-Valley art teacher Mandy DeWitt. South Dakota is only one of two states that has a state competition like this and DeWitt states, “We are very grateful to SDHSAA for all of their hard work and support of this program.”
DeWitt continued to explain that grades 7 through 12 compete and each school district determines what is sent to State Visual Arts. Art work can be submitted into 12 different categories and each school district can only send one work of art per category.
There are three judges that judge each art piece on criteria such as quality, materials and technique, originality, written artist statement and other factors, DeWitt explained. From there, the three scores are added up and totaled and students are ranked according to their school class.
Twelve students’ art work was submitted for the competition in the different categories and received the following placings:
Carly Rickenbaugh, 8th grade – 1st in Watercolor
Jayden Kruse, 11th – 2nd in Drawing Colored
Asmeret Abebe, 11th – 2nd in Drawing
Grace Schildhauer, 12th – 2nd in Traditional/Cultural
Ava Pearson – 10th, 2nd in Painting Oil/Acrylic
Aerin Geary – 11th, 2nd in 3D Sculpture
Mandy Flannery, 11th – 3rd in Functional Ceramics
Garret Leiseth, 12th – 3rd in Graphic Design/Multimedia
Benjamin DeMers, 12th – 4th in Crafts
Andi Sonnenburg, 11th – 5th in Mixed Media
Lawson Loiseau, 10th – 5th in Photography
Kaden Eggers, 10th – 6th in Printmaking
This is not the first year Tri-Valley has had such great success at State Visual Arts. Back in 2015, the first year of the competition, Tri-Valley took home first place with nine students placing in a variety of categories, according to DeWitt. “This year all 12 placed, which is a first and I am incredibly proud of them,” DeWitt stated.
DeWitt explained the Tri-Valley art students have also started a new competition to coincide with State Art. “It is called ArtWars and it is a live action art competition that was held Saturday morning. I had four students compete in that and we had two first place trophies and two second place trophies,” DeWitt said. She continued to explain that competition only had four categories which were Drawing, Painting, Photography and Ceramics. Each student that participated had one hour and 45 minutes to create a work of art from a prompt that they were given at the start of each competition.
DeWitt said, “State Visual arts is an amazing event, because it is so much fun to see the work that the students across the state are making. I love to see the variety of techniques, styles and ideas that these students are bringing out in their work.” She concluded, “Overall, we have this competition down to a science and we have amazing art teachers from around the state that all help to make it go very smoothly.”
Junior Andi Sonnenburg said, “I loved the weekend, it was a lot of fun. This gives the art kids a chance to show off like the sports kids.”