Juvenile Court selects first Art Scholarship winners
NEW PHILADELPHIA (WJER) (May 25, 2022) – The walls of Tuscarawas County’s Juvenile Courtroom are looking less bare following its first-ever Art Scholarship presentation.
First place in the contest that was open to all of the county’s graduating high school seniors went to New Philadelphia’s Hannah Levengood for her painting of the Tuscora Park pond.
“I decided I wanted to do something calm because the environment is obviously a little bit intimidating. So I went out to Tuscora Park and I took a picture of the pond because I thought that was something that was very serene and calm in the area that a lot of people would recognize. So I took a picture and then I went ahead and painted it with diluted acrylic with water on a canvas.”
Levengood will be heading to Kent State’s main campus in the fall to study studio art and won $500 toward her expenses. The runner-up was Claymont’s Regan Myers, who received a $250 scholarship for a still life drawing of objects people might find in their junk drawers.
“It was an assignment for my art class, and I decided to work with black paper because I thought it would be fun to be able to do the highlights. It was about composition, so I wanted it to look cool, like the shapes of it.”
Meyers is planning to major in English at Kent State and may study drawing as a minor. She and Levengood hung their artwork on the courtroom walls during a ceremony Tuesday afternoon. Each also received a foam gavel from Judge Adam Wilgus, who says plans to display the artwork indefinitely and make the contest a yearly occurrence.
“Really, there’s a lot of juveniles in Tuscarawas County that they express themselves through art, so them having an opportunity like this I thought was really nice for them, and it also serves a dual purpose because we wanted to dress up the courtroom a little bit, provide some artwork so that it wasn’t so bland when people come in.”
Wilgus was part of a panel that picked the winners from the eight submissions for the contest. He was impressed with all the entries but says the attention to detail and skills demonstrated by the winning artists set theirs apart from the rest.