Young Artists Take Top Honors

Fairfax County's student artists, long a force in the Scholastic Art Awards, racked up 23 national winners this year in the New York competition, its best showing in the contest.

Tamra Ferreira, art instructional specialist for the county's public schools and whose office organizes the regional judging, said the best previous showing was 20 national winners in 2006; 14 students got the national recognition last year.

"This is an amazing program," Ferreira said last week. "It really recognizes student achievement in arts."

The national winners have the highest profiles, but the size and sophistication of arts programs in the Fairfax region illustrate the depth in the pool of talent and how it continues to grow, county art administrators said.

Ferreira said that of 1,516 entries in the regional competition, 140 won Gold Keys and were sent to New York to be judged against entries from throughout the country. In recent years, 110 to 120 have made it to New York.

Fairfax County public schools is the regional sponsor of the awards, one of 76 affiliates of the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. As regional sponsor, the school system uses its art administrators to run the contest and must accept work by all middle and high school students, whether the students are in public, parochial or private schools, are home-schooled or create the work in extracurricular art projects or studios.

Ferreira said the entries began flooding her office in January, and it took her and Aaron Stratten, the school system's art resource teacher, a week to prepare them for judging, which this year was done in digital format.

A committee of 22 judges, artists, art educators and gallery owners from Northern Virginia, Richmond, the District and Maryland descended on the schools for the judging. When they were done, 140 winners were to be sent to New York for the national competition. Ferreira said that one of the judges had been a computer graphics winner in the competition as a high-schooler.

National winners and their parents will be invited to attend the national awards ceremony June 5 at Carnegie Hall in New York.

-- BOB SAMSOT