Tell the Bees

from today’s local paper…

By Wendy Keeler

Cape Elizabeth High School senior Chloe Brown has won enough Scholastic Arts awards that she could almost create a sculpture with them – most likely an award-winning sculpture.

The 18-year-old just won a regional Scholastic Arts Gold Key award for a work that features deconstructed and reconstructed ink drawings.”It is two pieces together,” Brown says. “One is an ink drawing, and the other is a dress I constructed out of ink drawings. I cut up the drawings and reconstructed them as a dress.”

Brown felt enormous excitement about winning this year’s award, despite having done so before. Last year she won a Silver Key award in the national competition and two regional Gold Key awards: one for a photographic self portrait and another for a conceptual ceramic sculpture.

“It is a huge honor. Getting an award the second year in a row is great,” Brown said.

It was also a big surprise.

Around the country, schools enter students’ outstanding work into regional competitions, in which work is exhibited and judged. Pieces that win at the regional level move onto the national competition.

In the fall, Brown’s CEHS art teacher, Richard Rothlisberger learned that because Maine College of Art (MECA) in Portland was stepping down from serving as regional sponsor, students would have to enter their work straight into the national competition, which Rothlisberger helped Brown do.

While in Costa Rica during February break, however, Brown learned pieces had in fact been judged regionally, and that her piece will move on to New York for the national competition along with other regional winners in the U.S.

Awards or not, Brown, the daughter of Cape artist Lina Newhouser and Craig Brown, will create art. That’s what she has done since she was a little girl, “and my mom got me into it,” and that’s what she will continue to do. Brown plans to go to art school next year.