6 students at King School win Scholastic Art & Writing Awards
STAMFORD — Six students at the private King School in Stamford were recently chosen as winners of Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, while another two students at the school received honorable mentions.
King senior Maddy Beck won a Gold Key award for her sculpture “FeminiTEA,” a visual representation of women breaking domestic stereotypes, and a Silver Key award for a portfolio of work she titled “HERoic,” which deals with women’s challenges and progress throughout history.
Gold Key winners are automatically considered for national awards.
“My art teachers at King have really been the ones to help foster my passion for art,” Beck said, in a press release from the school, which provides instruction to students from pre-K to 12th grade. “They have pushed me to think outside the box, encouraged me, and helped me take my art to a more sophisticated level.”
Ellie Wayland, a fellow senior at King, earned a Silver Key for her digital artwork “Cityscape,” a piece from a science fiction story she is creating using an iPad and the software program Procreate.
Another five students garnered awards in the argumentative writing category.
Junior Brian Karle and seniors Eli Lowe and Chloe Zange earned Silver Key awards.
Karle was awarded for his essay “Turning Pages”; Lowe won for “Queer Coding: An Incomplete Picture,” about how media depicts queer characters; and Zange was prized for “Vibrant, Complex, and Queer,” in which she illustrates how queer characters are often portrayed as stereotypes and villains in media.
“I applied to this competition because I wanted to put myself out there and share writing that I was proud of with others,” said Lowe in the release. “I found the things that I researched to be incredibly interesting, and I am happy that others saw it that way too. It is really special to me that they appreciated this essay about a topic that means a lot to me.”
Juniors Antonia Kolb and Catie Harvey both received honorable mention in the argumentative writing category.
Sophomore Madeleine Prather won a poetry award for “Pink Paint,” a free-verse poem about how life changes and evolves.
The Scholastic Art & Writing Awards is run by the nonprofit organization Alliance for Young Artists & Writers. The awards have existed for 100 years and past winners include Truman Capote, Andy Warhol, Sylvia Plath, Cy Twombly, and Stephen King. The poet Amanda Gorman won in 2016.