Topic: Paseo Academy's Senior Art Show
- May 15, 2008 04:55pm by NRG - livin the art that is life !
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A revival is under way at Paseo Academy
By JOE ROBERTSON
The Kansas City Star
Emiliano Zapata, 18 (front); Sydney Rebel, 16, (left); and Mark Bush, 18 (right), won the top three prizes in the Sister City Association’s local Young Artists competition. The three are students at Paseo Academy in Kansas City. Here’s how three Paseo Academy students found their way in their young careers and swept the top prizes in the Sister City Association’s regional art contest.
Second-place winner Mark Bush, like his heart-in-a-cage painting, hurled visual art at all the emotions he couldn’t — or wouldn’t — express in spoken words.
Third-place winner Sydney Rebel followed her interest in art and her wanderings through the sculpture garden of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art to the public high school art room “where people are real.â€
And Emiliano Zapata, who won the $300 top prize, grew from a childhood of scribbling on napkins or anything else he could find into a teenager in “pursuit of perfection.â€
There to receive them was Paseo, the Kansas City School District’s fine and performing arts school — which has striven to renew itself in the past three years as a home for painters, sculptors, singers, players, dancers and writers.
Many art students from schools throughout the Kansas City area submitted beautiful work for the Sister City Association’s 20th annual Young Artists Showcase, said Susan Keipp with Sister City.
That one school would take the top three awards is a remarkable achievement, she said.
The strength of entries from those three and other Paseo students encouraged their teacher, Jessica Manco.
Manco, a 1994 Paseo graduate, returned two years ago to help her alma mater’s revival after a journey that took her to Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York and the Instituto Allende in Mexico, where she earned her master’s degree.
“Paseo is coming back,†she said. “We’ve been taking baby steps.â€
Drawing the students in and nurturing their dedication to art is like their paintings themselves.
“It’s not immediate,†Manco said. “It takes layers. It’s an involved process.â€
Enthusiasm for the Sister City contest was particularly high this year because Kansas City will host the organization’s international youth conference this summer.
Participating cities across the U.S. and around the world held competitions, each sending its winning art to be judged in the international competition in Washington, D.C. The top 20 finalists’ works will be displayed in Union Station during the international conference in Kansas City July 16-19.
Contestants were asked to create art that reflected their cities.
Zapata’s prize-winning painting showed a line of young artists at work with the Bartle Hall pylons rising above them, and beyond them the gathering thunderheads of a distant spring storm.
Bush painted a still life of ceramics and art pieces from one of Kansas City’s sister cities in Asia.
Rebel fashioned an ode to the late Negro Leagues star and Kansas City icon Buck O’Neil.
Zapata is planning a career in art. He’d been drawing since he can remember and began to think of it as his calling since around age 11 or 12, he said.
He thought about the student artists who inspired him when he came to Paseo as a freshman. He talked of how art has become so much more personal, the same way he really wanted to know about the woman behind the face of a portrait he painted during a visit to a nursing home.
Now, as a senior, he suspects the younger students may be watching him.
“Hopefully, the process will repeat,†he said.
Zapata has been accepted at the Kansas City Art Institute and will be a freshman there this fall.
