GREENFIELD — An eighth grader at the Stoneleigh-Burnham School was selected out of about 300 contestants as the recipient of a $2,000 prize in an international art competition for her portrait of civil rights pioneer Sylvia Mendez.
Maia Castro-Santos, of the Springfield area, won the $2,000 junior division prize in the inaugural Unsung Heroes Art Competition for her paper collage portrait of Mendez, surrounded by words that defined the racism and discrimination of her time, according to a news release. Her piece will be displayed, along with other winning student art projects, in the Lowell Milken Center’s Hall of Unsung Heroes in Fort Scott, Kan., as well as online.
Mendez, born in 1936, is an American civil rights activist of Mexican-Puerto Rican heritage. When she was 8 years old, she and her brothers were denied acceptance into a white school, and in response, her parents filed a landmark desegregation case that paved the way for Brown vs. Board of Education, according to her biography on the LMS website.
In her artist statement, Castro-Santos wrote, “As another girl of Hispanic descent, I have her and her family to thank for speaking out against prejudice. She and her family showed me that if you see injustice in the world, you shouldn’t sit back and wait for it to sort itself out.”
Castro-Santos’ portrait of Mendez as a 9-year-old girl features a torn up newspaper article about the case from 1946, imagery of segregation and words including “blancos y mexicanos” (whites and mexicans), “tenia 9 años de edad” (she was 9 years old), “estudiantes” (students), “hispanos” (hispanics), and “segregación” (segregation), according to the statement.
“I wanted to use words in my own work to show their power,” Castro-Santos wrote. “I used torn-up pieces of magazines in the hope that I could show how pieces of ripped up paper can be glued together and layered into one unified whole, not unlike what Mendez did.”
According to the release, LMS’s Hall of Unsung Heroes, a state-of-the-art museum and exhibition space, will open in May. Entries for the competition came from across the United States and Europe.
“The Unsung Heroes Art Competition provides art students a deep and meaningful learning opportunity as they apply the lessons of history to their lives today and draw inspiration from universal values like courage and compassion,” LMC Executive Director Norm Conard said in the release. “We are thrilled to be featuring student art projects that celebrate positive role models from history in our new Hall of Unsung Heroes.”
The Lowell Milken Center for Unsung Heroes was established in 2007 and works to transform classrooms and communities through student-driven projects about unsung heroes from history, according to the release. In addition to LMC’s executive leadership, the competition was judged by experts in the fields of art history, design and museum education, including representatives from the Getty Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Art Center College of Design.
The competition offers cash prizes totaling $16,000 and is open to U.S. and international students in grades six to 12. Students may submit projects interpreting an unsung hero’s character and actions in two categories — Celebrating Unsung Heroes and Discovering unsung Heroes. Contestants are also required to submit at 500 to 1,000-word artist statement including their interpretation of the hero’s story and their personal connection to the subject matter.
To view all of the winning artwork, visit lowellmilkencenter.org/2016-art-competition-winners.