By Ashley Bradley/ne news editor
All TCC art students are invited to enter the first districtwide art competition scheduled at the Fort Worth Community Art Center.
With a Feb. 24 deadline approaching, students should get their best pieces together and take a shot at winning some money and some recognition from art gurus and fellow students.
All students can enter up to three pieces of work. The first entry is free, and the second and third entries are $10 each.
First place will win a predetermined purchase price, valued at more than $500. The second-place prize, the Zettie Carter Artistic Merit Award, is worth $500.
In addition, first ($100) and second ($50) place awards will be presented for advertising design, a new category.
Eight other merit awards for excellence in drawing, painting, printmaking, jewelry, ceramics, sculpture, photography and digital art will also come with cash and/or recognition.
Art associate professor and organizer of the event Anita Blayton will donate money for one of the merit awards in memory of her mother. She said art was something her mother always encouraged her to do.
“My mother was always supportive of my endeavors,” she said. “She was always behind me, and it just seems fitting to honor her this way. I was working on a very important piece when she had a stroke. She was the one who encouraged me to leave her bedside and get my work finished.”
Terri Thornton, education curator at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, will judge the competition. She has held her current position for 15 years and said she has judged several art competitions, but never for the TCC district. She said she plans to dive into the job with an open mind.
“I want to see work that demonstrates that it has ideas,” she said. “I’m hoping to see creativity and originality, some evidence that people are thinking though their work. I am looking for thought.”
Thornton’s own art, presented through drawing, can be seen in exhibits at the Barry Whistler Gallery in Dallas and the Wichita Falls Museum of Art. She said she doesn’t go looking for inspiration. She lets it come to her.
“A rich life offers a lot of material,” she said. “[Artists] should pay attention to the life they’re living. Good practice makes perfect. Every day and every piece builds momentum, and one idea branches to another. I would tell students to just keep working on experience.”
NW student Heather Bramen won Best in Show in fall 2009 in the NW art competition with a piece from a current series she is working on about childhood toys. She takes pictures of the toys, blows up the pictures and paints the image canvas. She said she hasn’t been painting for a long time, but she loves it and can see herself doing it as a career.
“I was a science student for five years. Then I came back to TCC,” she said. “I took a design class and across the hall was a painting class. Because it looked so fun, I decided to try it, and I loved it. Teachers here have given me encouragement to try this as a career.”
She said she wants to enter the district competition to get the experience and to let others look at her work.
Entries require the work to have been completed while enrolled at TCC, to comply with some size restrictions, to include an artist statement with a minimum of 125 words and to never have been exhibited outside of TCC campuses.
The closing reception and awards ceremony will take place March 27 at the Fort Worth Community Art Center. Times are still being arranged.
The top 25 pieces from each campus will be entered into the finals, which Thornton will judge.
“The whole point of the competition is so that students will understand how the real art world works,” Blayton said. “Students’ work should be their own, have imagination. There’s something about an impeccable piece.”
