Shooting for the Stars: Meet this year’s Johnson County arts scholarship finalists

After being nominated by a teacher and submitting a portfolio and resume, six East seniors are finalists of the Shooting Stars scholarships in different art-related categories offered by The Arts Council of Johnson County.

The Shooting Stars scholarships were created in 1997 with the help of then-executive director Bob Endres. At the time, there were no other recognition programs for students in Johnson County’s arts community.

“[The scholarships] were made to elevate high school seniors in the arts in order to boost arts and education in Johnson County,” current-executive director Allison Bowman said. “And to bring awareness to how important the arts are in education and to shed light on the amazing talent that we have in our community.”

In 1997, the first class of Shooting Stars had 27 finalists. This year, there are 105. 

The finalists of performing arts categories will give in-person presentations of their work on Jan. 28. Then, the judges will review the submissions for the physical art categories on Feb. 4 and decide the scholarship winners. 

Students, teachers and other community guests will attend their Shooting Stars Gala on Apr. 2 at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, where the council will recognize all finalists and announce winners of each category.

“What I really love about it is that it shows students and also their parents that people in the community take their art seriously,” art teacher and nominator Adam Finkelston said. “It feels really good to be told, ‘I want to nominate you for this field.’ I think it shows a lot of confidence in that person’s skill and their ability.”

“One day during Writer’s Workshop, Mrs. Andersen asked me to come over and talk to her about something really quick. And I think I asked, ‘Oh, am I in trouble, what happened?’ And she said that she thought I was a pretty strong writer and that I would be a good fit to be representing the school in the literature category.”

“I didn’t write anything with the intention of specifically including in my portfolio of work, but there was some stuff that I had written in between when I found out that I was nominated and when I created my portfolio that was included in the portfolio. I know there was one poem I created because I wanted to write something that wasn’t depressing — that was included. Mostly it was older stuff that I’ve written maybe over the past year. Four poems, all free verse — that’s kind of my niche. I love writing poetry, it’s definitely what I’m strongest at, what I feel the most comfortable doing. It was a lot of fun to get to go through my existing work and pick out the stuff that I thought was strong and I got to go back and fix up older poems.”

“I’ve sort of gone through phases where it’d be like two months where I’d write poetry and stuff throughout late elementary school into middle school, but then I kind of fell out of it a little bit between those times. Then last year, Summer 2021 that is, I started, really, really getting into it and just trying to work on my craft and really get good at it. Now I’m finally really in a place where I think that my work is strong. I think I’m definitely getting good, which is really exciting. I feel like I’m finally getting somewhere.” 

“Now it’s just sort of waiting. Waiting and waiting and waiting. I’m also hoping for the best for Ms. Andersen. I hope that she gets an honorarium because she’s an awesome teacher. She’s really, really helped me improve the quality of my writing just working with her. Even last year, I wasn’t in any of her classes, but she let me come in once a week after school and talk to her about poetry that I had.”

“I think in college I might take a few creative writing classes, though I plan to be a lawyer. I’m going to keep writing poetry on the side, trying to still get good and maybe even submit to poetry magazines, I probably will do that as I get older. A lot of great poets had jobs. William Carlos Williams, who’s one of my favorite poets, was a pediatrician. There’s a lot of poets who had day jobs. I think that it’s something that helps you connect with the world in a way that you really need when you’re writing poetry. It’s a lot less of a solitary thing than people think that it is.”

“Ms. Hensley, she was the ceramics teacher and now she’s the jewelry sculpture teacher, she told me about it. Last year she kind of mentioned it and said like, ‘You could be a possible candidate,’ kind of warming me up to the idea and then she told me that she wanted to nominate me and I was glad that she wanted to.”

“It was sophomore year when we went into the pandemic, I signed up for ceramics. I thought it was going to be just an easy class. They gave us just a whole bag of clay to take home with us and work on and I was really bored in quarantine, so I just started working with that clay and then I started really getting into it. I just kept coming to school, picking up more clay and building more stuff at home. When we finally could come back to in-person, it was a lot easier and I just kind of had a passion for it because it was just a creative outlet during quarantine.”

“I know I want to go to art school, but I’m not sure if I want to be a fine artist or a specific field. I definitely want to keep it as a hobby, but I’m still keeping my options open.”

“My first piece of my first collection that I did is my favorite. I submitted it to The Freelancer. It has a bunch of lips on it, like an abstract shape. That was my first piece of the series. I guess I just really liked that one because it was my first sculpture that I ever did. Like I’ve worked with painting and mugs, but it was my first abstract piece.”

“Mr. Capello actually picks one student for the theatre performance category, so he just told me, but I had known people in the past who’d been nominated, so I kind of knew about it. But pretty much he told me about it and I was going to be getting some emails and stuff. They sent me some sort of guidelines or rulebook kind of thing and there were all these preliminary steps you have to do. You have to complete your resume, and also complete community service and all these surface activities, as well as an essay about arts and how it’s affected you. Then once you complete all of the forms and paperwork, you’re a finalist.”

“I also went to a workshop with a presentation that was split into little groups of people who were either past judges or judges in the future for Shooting Stars and just answering questions about what it’s going to look like and what we should prep for it. Since it’s theater performance, you don’t actually have to sing, but the options were to do either two monologues or a song and a monologue. So I’m doing a song and a monologue, which they want to be contrasting in some way. But I’m doing “You’ll Be Back” from Hamilton, which I’m really excited about. Then I’m doing a monologue from a British play about a woman rejecting a proposal, so that was my more dramatic one. Anyway, it’s a very odd monologue, but hopefully will set me apart from everyone else.”

“It’s still a little bit up in the air, but I’m for sure going to Belmont in Nashville and I may do the songwriting program, but I also may do a minor in theater. So we’ll see. That’s kind of my current-ish plan, but I also might like to try out music business. So we’ll see kind of where it lands, but I do just definitely want to pursue music in some way. And this isn’t a major, but if I were to do anything, I’d want to do musical theater writing.”

“All of them are paintings except one is a charcoal and pencil drawing. Most of my work is centered around my identity and how food and my family kind of factor into that. I think the pieces I picked for this portfolio were specifically more my identity, so there’s one of me with my favorite stuffed animal, and then there’s one of me turning into a steamed bao. There’s one of my mom and my grandma and there’s one of magpies and a person, and it’s kind of painted a little bit in a Chinese traditional painting style but with patterns and stuff. The last one is a girl sitting in a window frame with lanterns surrounding her and fish.”

“I feel like most art is really personal, so originally I wanted most of my work to focus on people’s relationship with food because I really identify a little bit with that being who you are, whether that be your family’s recipes or some that are passed down from different generations. I think they’re really important in building relationships with other people as well. Just sharing a meal is really nice. But then a lot of my pieces just became really personal, so I kind of decided to go a little more [into] identity with that.”

“My mom used to do medical illustrations for KU. Now she doesn’t do that anymore, but she has always been drawing and she kind of inspired me to take up drawing and art and I remember we used to paint together which was really fun.”

“I’m not entirely sure, but I’ve applied to industrial design programs because I want to try it out first, then if I don’t like it I’ll see where that takes me. I was thinking about doing illustration as well, but I think that industrial design would be really good for job demand and a little more stability. But it would also be fun to make things that people actually use.”

“I was nominated for the photography category because of my experimentations with different styles of techniques of photography. I submitted five photography projects as my work. I think Fink because of my experimentation with quilting and the photography technique of cyanotype on fabric and the way it all turned out, I think he really liked that experimentation and that led to my nomination.”

“My first one is a cyanotype self-portrait of myself. We did a self-portrait project last year and it’s this photo of me and I have these silver embellishments on it as well, it’s a pretty big piece. The second one is another one in that self-portrait series. It’s of me again, but I’m looking in a different direction and there’s a photo transfer of a skull on top of my face. [For] my third piece, this year I experimented with a different camera that takes many photos on one negative. It’s a photo of this carousel spinny thing up at Harmon Park and I’m sitting on it. I had [senior Savannah Moore] spin me super fast and take five photos of it so it looks like I’m in motion. The fourth piece is the same concept, but a different angle and no one’s on it. My final piece is a quilt that I made and it’s got a photo of me and my sister on it and it’s using the cyanotype process again and basically I had to coat the fabric, then expose the fabric with the photo of me and my sister and then I created another pattern to add more to the quilt.”

“The first time I took dark room photography was last year and I really liked it and I wanted to keep learning new photo techniques. I really just kind of fell in love with cyanotype and experimenting with that. There’s other forms of photography that I do want to play around with but I’ve kind of found this niche of cyanotype and that’s just something that I like.”

“I’m going to KU for design and I’ve seen their dark room. I’m excited to take some photo classes and continue my learning process with that, and maybe I can use those skills in future projects as well.”

“I got nominated for the category of Production & Design and basically I had to submit my whole body of work for my portfolio, but I focused on my directing of my Frequent Friday, which is the one act I directed. I did a big focus on that for my presentation that I’m going to present in a couple weeks.”

“It kind of really started freshman year. I was doing crew for the musical and a lot of the other smaller productions like the [Frequent Fridays] directed by the seniors. That was where it started, but I really started building up my portfolio last year, junior year, when I directed two other one acts and we had to direct and produce those. I wrote an original for a project that we do and that’s kind of where a lot of that comes from, a lot of the getting involved in theatre. I’m also the Sound Crew Chief and I’ve had to put together a lot of the resources that we use during the musical season and during all the seasons for the mainstages.”

“I’m not entirely sure. I’m hoping at some point it will find its way into the work that I do, hopefully maybe in content creation if I find myself actually doing that. I’ve been wanting to pursue getting into making YouTube videos and streaming, and then also music videos for some of the songs I produce. Hopefully some of the experience from that will find its way helping me out in the process for sure.”