Dec 30, 2013 2 min read

As they have in years past, professional artists, educators and writers will be gathering at California University of Pennsylvania next month to select winners in the annual Southwestern Pennsylvania Scholastic Art and Writing Awards competition, with the winning art being displayed starting Jan. 27 at Cal U.’s Manderino Library.

A ceremony honoring the winners will follow Feb. 9 at Steele Auditorium on the Cal U. campus.

All of the art will spring from the imaginations of students in middle and high schools in Greene, Washington and Fayette counties.

The students’ work has been consistently impressive over the years.

As we noted in an editorial last year, “We have been awed by the mature reflections set to a poetic rhythm and by such powerful imagery and description that left us wondering how a ninth-grader could know such things.”

Artworks that triumph locally will receive similar scrutiny from a panel of judges in New York.

The Scholastic Art and Writing Awards competition is, perhaps, just the beginning of many achievements for these students. Considering that luminaries like Andy Warhol, Sylvia Plath, Truman Capote and Richard Avedon are veterans of this contest, you could end up seeing a work at Cal U. that, one day, will be for sale at Sotheby’s or Christie’s as an example of a master’s early work.