Honorable Mention - High School
Northeast Academy, Oklahoma City

My Town: Where We Live, Learn, Work, Pray and Play.

What do you say to a student who says, "I don't want to do My Town. I don't live in a two story house with a white picket fence and two cats and a dog..."? This opened the class for discussion. In our history of Oklahoma, not everyone has had equal opportunity. This may have been due to race, economics, education, and many other variables. This class discussion led us into depicting a piece of art that told this story regarding the choices we each make in our daily life. Because of drugs, violence, and gangs, some of my students, as in other schools, may not be here tomorrow. The choices they make, and we make today, as a community, can determine that difference.

With the seed of an idea of the crossroads in our hearts, five students volunteered to be models, and we chose by secret ballot. Each struck a pose against the wall in our art room with his or her arms raised clasped together to represent hope in the future.

On the wall was a sign in large letters that said "art studio". The letter T was coming out the model's head and it naturally formed a cross. This is how the cross was incorporated into our art work, just by "coincidence." One student, during class, was separating her Wrigley's gum wrapper, and the beautiful metallic silver glistened. It became the paper on our cross, as 25 packages of gum were consumed to obtain the material for the cross. Look closely, and you will see Wiggles still imprinted on the wrapper. The cross design came from a cross a student wears around his neck everyday in class.

Around the figure is a golden aura which was made from the candy bars wrapper sales of a fund raiser. This golden light represents the invisible light around each of our spirits around the world. The central figure represents each of us, regardless of race, gender, and other differences. He is in the cross roads of life deciding his future.Each of us everyday makes choices in life that affect us in either a pleasant or an unpleasant way. On the left of this figure is the brick wall. This is the side that can weigh us down in life: gangs, drugs, poverty, ignorance, and prejudice, things that bring us down, and which build invisible walls hard to penetrate by those that love us. The right side of the wall represents the things that can assist us in life: education, faith, church, knowledge, freedom (this is why the school is collaged in red, white and blue) and truth.

Behind the central figure is the stained-glass window, the arch way of life. The figure represents each of us daily in the cross roads of our life and its invisible reality.