Congratulations to last year’s Senior, Marceline Castrillon, who is 1 of only 50 students in the country whose artwork was selected by AP College Board for inclusion in the 2023 AP Art and Design Exhibit!  This year’s exhibit features high-quality student artwork showcasing a diverse range of student ideas, styles of artmaking, materials used, and conceptual and physical processes involved with making works of art and design. The 2023 AP Art and Design Exhibit is scheduled for publication on December 1, 2023.

Congratulations to Meijin Patil who won 3rd place for her photo, “Fish out of Water” and Natalie Blouin, who won Honorable Mention for her digital painting, “By Bycatch” in the 2023 Congressional Arts Competition for Virginia’s 8th District and Congressman Don Beyer!

“Fish out of Water” by Meijin Patil and “By Bycatch” by Natalie Blouin

National Scholastic Art Medalists for 2023

The Wakefield Art Department is thrilled to announce that Wakefield has 6 winners!!! This is an all-time record for most National Scholastic Medal wins in a year for Wakefield. We also have a very special win that is a first in Arlington county history!

• Marceline Castrillon- National Gold Medal for her Photography Portfolio, “A Swan is Born”
• Nusibha Choudhury- National Silver Medal for her Ceramics Portfolio, “Correlation Between Nature and Mental Health”
• Grace Brougham- National Silver Medal for her photo, “Clipped”
• Marceline Castrillon (again:))- National Silver Medal for her photo, “Saint Sebastian “
• Melanie Encinas Mendoza- National Silver Medal for her drawing, “Practice Makes Perfect”
• Jayden Pena-National Gold Medal for his photo, “The Boxer”

This is a huge win for Wakefield, as our artists have won 6 of the 13 Arlington National Medals this year, 2 of which are Portfolio Awards. A Scholastic Arts portfolio consists of 6 works of art that have a cohesive theme showing the vision and talent of the artist, the culmination of 4 years of art, and is accompanied by an artist’s statement.

With that being said, Marceline Castrillon has won Arlington County’s very first Gold Medal Art Portfolio! There are only 8 art portfolios that are awarded National Gold each year as this special distinction comes with a $12,500 scholarship! In addition, Nusibha Choudhury was 1 of only 60 National Silver Medal portfolios awarded this year.

To put everything into perspective and to highlight this phenomenal achievement, here is the official information from Scholastic Arts: More than 300,000 works of art and writing were submitted to the 2023 Scholastic Awards. Your work was selected by some of the foremost leaders in the visual and literary arts for excellence in originality, technical skill, and the emergence of a personal voice or vision. Less than 2,000 works received a National Medal, which places you within the top 1% of all submissions! Here’s to Wakefield cracking the 1% year after year.

The results for the Regional Scholastic Art Awards are in and our amazing Wakefield Art students claim a whopping 357 individual Awards (247 last year)! We also picked up 27 Portfolio awards (16 last year)!

Portfolios are a thematic body of 6 works that is a visual culmination of 4 years of Art and is limited to Seniors.

In total, our students won 80 individual Gold Keys, 105 Silver Keys, and 172 Honorable Mentions. They also won 25 Gold Keys and 2 Silver Keys for their Art portfolios.

You can see all of their beautiful artwork here

Guiselle Gomez received the Award of Excellence for Photography

Evelyn Rives won Outstanding Interpretation for Visual Arts

Congratulations to Jason Doll (11th), Evelyn Rives(10th) and Guiselle Gomez(12th) who were all recognized as winners in the APS Reflections Contest. Reflections is a nationwide contest and arts promotion program that encourages students to create works in dance choreography, film production, literature, musical composition, photography, and visual arts, based on a common theme. This year’s theme was “Show Your Voice!” Jason earned Outstanding Interpretation for Literature, and Evelyn won Outstanding Interpretation for Visual Arts. Guiselle received the Award of Excellence for Photography. Jason’s and Evelyn’s entries will now advance to the state-level competition.

Wakefield students have won 1st, 2nd and 3rd place in the 2023 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Literary and Visual Arts contest in the Visual Arts category for High School again!

“Written Out of Existence” by Anjarra Lee

“Women Life Freedom” by Genesis Monjaras

“He Is Who He Is” by June Gardner

This now makes the 3rd year in a row that Wakefield has won all awards in the Visual arts category for this competition. This year’s MLK prompt: Describe in writing or visual art a time when you saw someone treated unfairly because of what they looked like or who they were; OR an event in history where people were treated unfairly because of what they looked like or who they were.

This year’s winners are…

• 1st Place – Anjarra Lee, “Written Out of Existence”, 10th Grade
• 2nd Place – Genesis Monjaras, “Women Life Freedom”, 11th Grade
• 3rd Place – June Gardner, “He Is Who He Is”, 12th Grade

Winners will be recognized in a video tribute at the APS school board meeting on January 19th, 2023. Congratulations to our Wakefield Artists!

You can find all the winners on the APS webpage:https://www.apsva.us/post/2023-dr-martin-luther-king-jr-literary-visual-arts-literary-arts-winners/