DEPARTMENT TO SHOWCASE WINNERS’ WORKS FROM NATIVE AMERICAN STUDENT ARTIST COMPETITION

Tradition is My Life, Education is My Future is this year’s theme for the Office of Indian Education’s 5th Annual Native American Student Artist Competition.  The exhibit, 21 matted and framed art pieces and a book of essays, will open in the Department’s lobby on July 21 at 10:30 a.m. with a Native American blessing by Clayton Old Elk of the Crow Nation, and remarks by Department and Smithsonian Institution officials as well as by student winners in art and writing.  

 

The competition celebrates the value and successes of education in Native American communities and is open to all American Indian and Alaska Native students in prekindergarten through grade 12.  First-place winners in the 6th- through 8th-grade and the 11th- through 12th-grade categories will speak at the exhibit opening and ribbon-cutting ceremony.  Macklin Becenti, a high school junior from the Navajo tribe, and Paige Fourkiller, a seventh-grader from the Cherokee tribe, will present their artwork, and Angela Pacheco, a senior from the Santo Domingo Pueblo, will present her winning essay.

 

The Department’s Office of Indian Education produces the competition with the goal of inspiring students to explore the connection between their education and culture through art and writing.

 

Over the course of the next year, the exhibit will be displayed at several other venues, including the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, the Oklahoma History Center, Chicago Children’s Museum, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

More information about the exhibit and past and future competitions can be found at http://kids.indianeducation.org/sac.  The names of the winners are attached.

 

To visit the exhibit and for more information about the Department’s Student Art Exhibit Program, now in its sixth year, contact Jackye Zimmermann at 202-401-0762 or at jacquelyn.zimmermann@ed.gov.

 

#  #  #