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The annual Springville Art show, this year featuring the work of 341 seniors and juniors, is known as the biggest high school art show in the state of Utah. To have work accepted and shown at the Springville Museum of Art is often considered a high honor among students, one of these students being NS senior Henry Degroff.
“It’s a pride thing,” said visual arts teacher Paul Allred. “But it’s also a way to see how you relate to kids at your same age and how you compare to [those] from different schools.”
In total, the artwork featured in the show comes from over 100 schools across Utah. With the help of teachers, a limited number of juniors and seniors from each school submit works in hopes of being accepted by the show’s jury.
“We do a calculation just so that we have the capacity at our museum to hold all of the artworks that will be submitted,” said the museum’s High School and Teacher Program specialist, Jordan Hansen. “We give all of the schools a number, what we call an allotment number, of works they can submit from the high school, and that’s based off of the population of the junior and senior class of the high school.”
In hosting the show, the Springville Museum of art hopes to provide opportunities to students and encourage aspiring artists.
“We’re really dedicated to preserving and promoting Utah artists in our museum’s collection,” Hansen said. “In this type of show that’s a juried exhibition, it does that same thing, and it does it for the younger artists of Utah.”
This year, of the 1,093 works submitted by students, only 341 were chosen for display in the show. Among these is the work of Henry DeGroff, a senior at NS.
“I think I was pretty confident, but still, the majority of entries get cut,” DeGroff said. “I feel like I had a pretty good shot, though.”
Creating a piece for the show is an opportunity for students to exercise creativity and demonstrate skill in a medium of their choice.
“I drew a tree with pen and ink,” DeGroff said. “Lots of people look at it and say, ‘Wow, this looks really good, it must have taken you a long time,’ but it didn’t take me too long. I just drew it.”
Not only does being accepted into the show provide a sense of pride among students, but it also creates a variety of opportunities to win awards and scholarships.
“It’s a great resume builder, to be able to put awards on resumes or college applications, especially if students are applying for arts schools or trying to pursue an art major–it’s great recognition from that perspective,” Hansen said.
Among these awards is the “Student of the Year” award, which recognizes student involvement and accomplishments in the arts.
“We take [into account] achievements from past high school art shows,” Hansen said. “For example, the winner this year was a student from Layton High School, and she got both of her pieces in the show, which is a really big deal. This student also had gotten two awards for both of those pieces, and she had also gotten both of her pieces in the show last year as a junior.”
Congressional awards are also available to a select few.
“If you get one of the congressional awards, they fly you to Washington DC,” Allred said. “Then your piece stays at the nation’s capital for a year.”
Selecting, curating, and organizing student artwork for the show requires a team of people: for each type of artwork, three people are needed to select the pieces that will be on display, amounting to a total of twelve jurors.
“We have new jurors every year who come to the museum for a full day, and they are divided by medium,” Hansen said. “We had jurors for photography and digital art, jurors for drawing, jurors for painting, and jurors for 3D sculpture.”
Once the pieces have been chosen and decided upon, a curator organizes the display.
“Our collections manager works really hard on curating the show in such a quick turn around,” Hansen said. “I would say the show went up two weeks after jury day, maybe a little less.”
With so many tasks so little time to do them, museum employees put full effort into preparing the show for opening night.
“A lot of hard work goes into that; we have to make the labels with all of the students’ artist statements, we have to curate the show, which means trying to have good design in the presentation and conception of how the pieces are placed on the wall or as a sculpture.”
The all-state high school art show has gained popularity since the year of 1972 when it first began and aims to continue to support and recognize artistry in high school students.
“It’s in its 48th year, which is really exciting,” Hansen said. “It has become a big tradition not just for our museum, but for Utah as a whole.”
