Brit Micho, Associate Curator of Exhibitions
The nation’s longest running and most prestigious regional and national recognition program for creative teens, the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards celebrates the artistic and literary expression of students in grades 7-12. Of the hundreds of students that are shown in the 2025 Scholastics exhibition, there are three young artists that have shown immense talent I wanted to highlight as my personal favorites (a task I dare say was hard to do)!
Walking into the first gallery, one that stood out to me, quite literally, was Brooklynn Deane’s work entitled lebensraum, meaning “living space” in German.A winner of a Gold Key, this three-dimensional piece features a realistic figure, uncomfortably confined in a small box–the state of nudity and facial expressions emphasizing the figure’s discomfort and vulnerability.
Deane’s current body of work focuses on the effects of hoarding. Having experienced these spaces in her personal life, she explains, “I’ve sat in my grandma’s living room many times and have felt discomfort from its overwhelming atmosphere. I wanted to try and express how I imagine living in a habitat like that would feel.” While the intention of the work is based on the discomfort of living in a crowded environment as a result of hoarding, the feeling evoked can be universal for other issues people face. It could represent claustrophobia, being an emotionally trapped mental space, or a difficult living situation.
Even though hoarding can lead to serious and harmful situations, Deane relays her respect for their mindset in that they are able to give new life and, “value to things people might see as junk. In a way they make their homes into their own treasure troves.”
Deane, a Sophomore at Canterbury High School, is represented by 2 other Gold Key awards in Art and 1 Honorable Mention in the Scholastics galleries.
__ In the larger gallery, Layla Burkart’s One Woman’s Lament stands as a successful sculpture combining photography, poetry, and fashion, while also carrying a strong message about the challenges of womanhood that surround the artist.
Upon first glance, the viewer is met with a cage hoop skirt with various photographs and strips of paper sewn into each panel. Some of these photographs are of Burkart’s family–her mother, grandmother, and great grandmother–while other photos are fragmented parts of the artist’s body, such as her fingers, her stomach, or her thigh.
Burkart, a senior at Carroll High School, was awarded an Honorable Mention with this piece. She hand wrote her own poetry on various photographs, her favorite being Thinly Veiled Despair written across cherries that reads:
I’m a broken mess of a
girl trying desperately
to put herself back together
into a woman
so that one day,
when my daughter asks me
how to be a little less
angry
I hope I have an answer.
One Woman’s Lament talks about societal expectations placed upon women and what ‘being a woman’ is defined as. Burkart states that, “There was a point in my life that I didn’t think of myself as womanly because I felt as though I didn’t meet those aspects.” Her fragmented body photography specifically targets this feeling, challenging these so-called “ugly parts” to defy these expectations and uplift them into beauty.
Delicately sitting atop the hoop skirt are multiple butterflies signifying the phenomenon of the caged butterfly, a metaphor for the paradox of feeling both freedom and restraint. These butterflies rest freely on top of the skirt, which acts as a cage, afraid to fly. Burkart explains, “This is a giant metaphor for my understanding of femininity, and womanhood changing throughout my life and letting go of ideals I held for so long that were damaging to me.”
__ Adjacent to Burkart’s hoop skirt sits KyLeah Mock-Hammond’s Death to The Puppet Master that features a haunting bust portrait of a figure with a hole through its chest and twisted springs popping out from beneath its skin.
Mock-Hammond is a sophomore at Bryan Middle-High School whose work won a silver key award. Here, she sculpts a facial expression that speaks to her trauma, depicted by the pained, silent scream of the figure. The springs suggest internal conflicts literally bursting from the chest and, as a result, causing harm to others–an all too real effect of unresolved trauma.
The artist invites the viewer to relate to the sculpture as they see fit, which allows for a wonderful array of interpretations. Is this in the moment of death that we see this figure yelling out? Has its death already happened, and the viewers are left to interpret the aftermath, almost like a crime scene? Referenced from the title, who is the puppet master and who is the puppet? Self and self alike? Perhaps the Puppet Master is an allegory for an emotion or a period of time that ruled over the viewer and is finally laid to rest. Deane, Burkart, and Mock-Hammond’s works are surrounded by strong art from all over Indiana and Ohio that tell deep and inspiring stories from young artists.
If you wish to see these amazing artists, visit the Fort Wayne Museum of Art before the Scholastics exhibition closes on April 6th, 2025.
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