The month of April was a busy, but successful one, in the Benton Art Department. The month started with our Annual Benton Art Show at the Middle School/ High School, and ended with the WaMaC Conference Art Show in Grinnell.
The Annual Benton Art Show consists of hundreds of artworks from the past year, from drawings, paintings and photographs, to three-dimensional artworks. Every student, who has taken an art class submits at least one of their project for the show, though they are welcome to submit as many as they would like. The artworks are then separated into multiple categories, where they will be judged against other, artworks that were made using similar materials. The main categories are; Drawing, Painting, Photography, Three-Dimensional Art and Mixed-Media, which is artwork made using more than one material. There is also a Middle School 2-D category and a Middle School 3-D category. Occasionally, the judge requests that some categories be split into sub-categories based on the overwhelming amount of quality entries, which makes deciding on the place-winners difficult. So the Drawing category has been split into specific materials, like graphite and charcoal before to solve this issue.
Once all of the artwork has been judged, awards are given for 1st, 2nd and 3rd Place, along with an Honorable Mention. There is also an award given for Best of Show Overall.
This year with there were twenty-eight winners in the seven categories that we had, along with a Best of Show 2-D and Best of Show 3-D awards.
The WaMaC Art Show consists of Benton, and the other schools on the West side of the WaMaC Conference; South Tama, Vinton, Williamsburg, Clear Creek Amana, and Grinnell. The site of the show is on a rotation, so that each school gets the opportunity to host every several years. This year it was hosted by Grinnell at their high school. The WaMaC Show is set up much like the Benton Show with artwork being divided up into categories with other similar materials. The categories are a bit more specific at the WaMaC Show, due to the amount of potential work that is considered from each school. There are approximately twenty categories total, and each school is only allowed to enter twenty artworks in total from the thousands of artworks they see in a year. This makes choosing the artwork extremely difficult, and quite the honor for a student to have their work selected for the show.
Benton left the event having placed thirteen of the twenty pieces of artwork that were entered, as well as the Student’s Choice Award.
In all, thirty students and their artworks receive recognition, between the two shows, which is an excellent showing for Benton and our students. What’s not apparent, in results from the art shows, is how much hard work, time and effort is put into each of the artworks. The Art Shows are just a small sample of all of that, but fortunately a very public sample, that allows all that work to be recognized.
