Elizabeth Crofton
Columbia High School students have earned awards and have been featured in prestigious art and photography contests.
Columbia High School senior student Elizabeth Crofton has been recognized by the 2020 Scholastic Art Awards in the Northern New Jersey Art Region. Her entry, Treehouse, won the Gold Key award in the architecture category, and she won an Honorable Mention for her sculpture, Contrasting Cubes: Growth & Decay.
Lillian Petruziello won two Honoroable Mentions from the Scholastic Art Awards Northern New Jersey Art Region for her works Phobia and Kewpie.
Crofton explained that she created her treehouse inspired by “Bahay Kubo,” the Filipino indigenous house, “as my mother’s heritage inspired me. I built the treehouse that usually sits on a stilt instead as part of the tree branch, using the center as a post and a platform spanning between branches.” She created the treehouse as part of the architecture class under Mr. Brauner at CHS, where she designed an organic shape and pattern in CAD for the wall and used a laser cutter to create its free form design.
Crofton’s sculpture, Contrasting Cubes: Growth & Decay, resulted from an architecture workshop at CalPoly where students were asked to craft cubes to explore two opposing characters. She chose to contrast growth and decay and use the color blue to show the depth of change and the decline in the cube’s six sides and surface. Using the color blue, one of the cube’s growth expands and enhances the cube’s nature, and the other cube’s decay as cut and contracted inside.
Lillian Petruziello with her works “Kewpie” and “Phobia”
Lillian Petruziello’s piece “Kewpie”, is a colored pencil still life of objects from her mother’s childhood and “Phobia” is a watercolor painting based on two photographs she took of a friend’s hand about to squeeze the juice of a lemon half into their own eye.
Elizabeth and Lillian will be celebrating with the other recognized students in a virtual 2021 Scholastic Art Awards Ceremony for Northern New Jersey Region on Thursday, February 26 at 6 pm. Register for free here. Afterward, the winners will have a virtual exhibition on the Montclair Art Museum website starting in February.
CHS photography students Sophia Plaitakis and Avani Mitra were featured at the Art Administrators of New Jersey (AANJ) ‘s 2021 Emerging Artists Virtual Awards Ceremony on Sunday, January 24. This exhibit presents art work produced by students who are studying art in high schools throughout the State of New Jersey. The works are judged and Awards of Merit and Honorable Mention are presented to student artists. Award recipients are eligible to submit a portfolio of images and compete in the Art Administrators’ Achievement Award program in which one student will be selected to receive an additional cash recognition and a Governor’s Award in the spring. This year’s show included work from twenty-eight students from twenty-one high schools across the state.
