Art Students Spark Creativity With Their Art Now
Three Pioneer seniors make it into the 2024 NUMU ArtNow competition.
By Em Sandis
Three Pioneer seniors make it into the 2024 NUMU ArtNow competition.
By Em Sandis
As the theme of this year’s ArtNow competition, thoughts of “In Transition” of the self and the world filled the minds of students from the art department’s AP Special Projects and Advanced Sculpture as they crafted their pieces to enter for the artistic event.
ArtNow, the highly competitive art show available for students all over Santa Clara County, recently announced their 2024 winners. The event is hosted by the New Museum Los Gatos, known as NUMU, each year through eight medium categories, where students may submit a piece that connects to a theme. This year, the three winners that were selected from Pioneer were seniors Ricky Hernandez, Yan Hernandez and Sharon Kim.
The theme of “In Transition” can be interpreted differently for each, but for Kim it meant a quiet celebration from life to death and a bittersweet freedom, through her medium of sculpture.
“Decay is another transition of life that everybody goes through, but I don’t want to think of it as a scary process. As the end comes for all things, I would want mine to be as calm and peaceful as a nap,” said Kim.
While everyone’s experience and their own “transitions” are different, most people can share commonality with one another. While Kim focused on the theme of death, Yan Hernandez chose to focus on life despite aging and the inevitable death. She chose to turn her attention to women’s real life experiences through life and the decay of beauty, through beads and thread.
“Death and aging are transitions. I feel like not a lot of people talk about the feeling of being a young woman only to realize that you’re not as young as you thought you were. Aging is really looked down upon by society so I wanted to do a piece that discussed that,” said Yan Hernandez.
Art shows and art in general is an act of emotion, especially when the artist has to connect their piece to a theme. For the case of Kim, she connected the anger and sadness she experienced to the overfishing crisis.
“As I stood at a fishing port, watching heaps of fish dumped from a boat drained with a murky red diluted sludge back into the sea, with a stench so suffocating, it made me sick,” said Kim.
Art teachers Stacy Luskin and Annie Tobin are the biggest resources for artistic students on campus to turn to when it comes to creating and entering pieces for art shows like ArtNow.
“I try to give them enough info on all the shows that are happening and then support them if they got an idea for a theme, work through a bunch of different brainstorming ideas, look at it in progress and see how we can take it further and connect it to the themes,” said Luskin.
The ArtNow competition and its Pioneer winners are an overall reflection on the program on campus and the talent from the art program. The theme of “In Transition” is presented through individual exposures and collective experiences.
“I think it was kind of a cool way to get kids to think conceptually about what it means to them to transition and I think it's something that every person can connect to since everyone has gone through some sort of change in their life,” said Luskin.
ArtNow, the highly competitive art show available for students all over Santa Clara County, recently announced their 2024 winners. The event is hosted by the New Museum Los Gatos, known as NUMU, each year through eight medium categories, where students may submit a piece that connects to a theme. This year, the three winners that were selected from Pioneer were seniors Ricky Hernandez, Yan Hernandez and Sharon Kim.
The theme of “In Transition” can be interpreted differently for each, but for Kim it meant a quiet celebration from life to death and a bittersweet freedom, through her medium of sculpture.
“Decay is another transition of life that everybody goes through, but I don’t want to think of it as a scary process. As the end comes for all things, I would want mine to be as calm and peaceful as a nap,” said Kim.
While everyone’s experience and their own “transitions” are different, most people can share commonality with one another. While Kim focused on the theme of death, Yan Hernandez chose to focus on life despite aging and the inevitable death. She chose to turn her attention to women’s real life experiences through life and the decay of beauty, through beads and thread.
“Death and aging are transitions. I feel like not a lot of people talk about the feeling of being a young woman only to realize that you’re not as young as you thought you were. Aging is really looked down upon by society so I wanted to do a piece that discussed that,” said Yan Hernandez.
Art shows and art in general is an act of emotion, especially when the artist has to connect their piece to a theme. For the case of Kim, she connected the anger and sadness she experienced to the overfishing crisis.
“As I stood at a fishing port, watching heaps of fish dumped from a boat drained with a murky red diluted sludge back into the sea, with a stench so suffocating, it made me sick,” said Kim.
Art teachers Stacy Luskin and Annie Tobin are the biggest resources for artistic students on campus to turn to when it comes to creating and entering pieces for art shows like ArtNow.
“I try to give them enough info on all the shows that are happening and then support them if they got an idea for a theme, work through a bunch of different brainstorming ideas, look at it in progress and see how we can take it further and connect it to the themes,” said Luskin.
The ArtNow competition and its Pioneer winners are an overall reflection on the program on campus and the talent from the art program. The theme of “In Transition” is presented through individual exposures and collective experiences.
“I think it was kind of a cool way to get kids to think conceptually about what it means to them to transition and I think it's something that every person can connect to since everyone has gone through some sort of change in their life,” said Luskin.