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McKinney student's sculpture chosen for Dallas Museum of Art award
Photo courtesy of AP Arts – McKinney Boyd High School junior Larissa LoGelfo’s “Sheng Ming,” a two-foot dragon sculpture made with branches, leaves and pine cones, earned the 2013 AP Studio Art Young Masters People’s Choice Award.
By Chris Beattie, cbeattie@starlocalnews.com
Larissa LoGelfo carefully shades in a drawing, a scaled tale pushing from the paper. It's a dragon, a smaller, flatter reminder of her recent feat.
Her teacher walks around the McKinney Boyd AP classroom, mostly silent, for the process, especially in LoGelfo's case, is natural. She molds her mind's eye into existence.
That form reached out to hundreds in recent months at the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA), where LoGelfo's piece "Sheng Ming" won the People's Choice Award, a top honor for this year's Young Masters Fine Arts Exhibition.
Fittingly, "Sheng Ming" means life in Chinese, and attune to her fascination with the mythical beasts, LoGelfo's work stands alone -- as it stood out among close to 50 other pieces selected for the annual display.
The O'Donnell Foundation and DMA have sponsored the exhibition since 1995, each year celebrating the creativity and skill of AP art history, music theory and studio art. All three are integrated at the late-winter showing to reinforce "interconnectedness of the arts," states the AP Arts website.
The exhibition's art history side shows essays on DMA's permanent collection, its music theory portion featuring four-minute compositions. Studio art submissions must be original 2D or 3D works, and compete against entries from around Texas. A panel of artists chose about 50 pieces from 700 submissions, said Boyd AP art teacher Shannon Kessler.
LoGelfo actually created hers over a four-month span last school year, when Kessler tasked students to make a sculpture with natural materials. A few ideas etched into LoGelfo's mind, her choice swiftly became clear.
"There's no right or wrong with dragons," she said this week, a few days after her sculpture's display time ended. "Since they aren't real, they can be whatever, really."
She breathed life into the classic fire-breather with branches and leaves for a tail and spikes, pine cones for scales. Berries and textured fiber paper compliment a reed frame and enable it to stand without a base.
LoGelfo said the "ambitious project" took longer than expected, mixed with other ongoing class assignments.
"She actually finished it after the nine-week period, so it was one of those I had to give a grade for progress, not necessarily completed," said Kessler, proving LoGelfo's claim of Boyd AP art teachers' hands-off guidance. "But even the structure before it was covered [in papier-mâché] was just amazing."
LoGelfo first entered it in last April's Visual Arts Scholastic Event (VASE), an annual statewide art competition for high school students. "Sheng Ming" was part of the "1 percent" selected to move on from the regional level, Kessler said, and earned a superior rating at state -- by the skin of its branchy tail.
"She was finishing it up minutes before walking it in to the judge," Kessler recalled.
Though VASE judges didn't herald the dragon as highly as DMA onlookers, its creator wowed them with her process. During a scholarship workshop when dozens of students were asked to draw a still-life of food, LoGelfo instead drew someone at a desk drawing the food. She folded an attaching note card and eraser into dragons, placing them atop her still-life.
"I was the only one out of the 40 to 50 kids who got the scholarship," LoGelfo said. "I guess because I didn't do what they told me to do."
Thinking -- and doing -- outside the box, inside their imagination, is what Kessler said makes AP art tick at Boyd. Teachers are there as facilitators, prop-givers, helpers when needed. Their approach is reaping benefits.
"Last year, [art teacher Samuel Thomas] and I had pieces at the DMA, but this is the first time one got People's Choice," Kessler said.
It may have been coming for LoGelfo, who admits to youthful pouts when she missed her weekly art class in elementary school.
"Larissa has always had a natural talent for art since she was old enough to hold a crayon," said her mother, Tina. "It has been amazing to watch her skills and creativity improve over the years."
Just a junior, she's already eyeing Savannah College of Art and Design, a premier private institute in Georgia, to further her abilities. She hopes to get into graphic design for games and shows, to employ ideas from within.
And she plans to do it naturally -- a lesson learned, at least partially, through a dragon.
"I didn't look at anything, just came up with a concept and physically made it," LoGelfo said. "It's pretty cool to bring life to something you imagined."
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