It’s ARTS Dead Night and my car is screeching dangerously to a stop in the Carver Center parking lot. I yell at Jason Benson, ’05, that I want my car alive and well so that when I’m a senior, I too can drive to Dead Night.
Jason and I walk through the lobby, down the hall, past the innumerable paintings from award-winning Carver students, ranging from Carver’s first ARTS winner, Randy Albright, ‘96, to our seven (“count ‘em, seven!” painting teacher Terry McDaniel has been known to exclaim) ARTS winners this year: the seniors Abdi Farrah, Leah Fassbinder, Amy Reid, Andy Tanner, and Shannon Wenker, and the ‘04 alumni Jeremy Hyman and Dmitry Morozov. Competition organizers say this is an unprecedented feat; nothing close to one third of the ARTS winners have come from one school in the past. But right now, no one knows who will win $10,000 and a trip to Florida. Right now, every one is scrambling to arrange slides and grab the last slice of pizza.
“Before Halloween,” explains Joe Giordano, head of the Carver Visual Art department, “We have this thing called ARTS Dead Night, which is when all the seniors, just before ARTS applications are due, set up all the slide tables, and we select the work that’s going to be submitted. We have old ARTS winners and other artists talk to the students. So all these slides are on light tables and students are asking, “What do you think about this? What do you think about that?”
So I’m mazing through the slide tables, trying to get to the pizza. Abdi Farrah, ’05, one of the Fabulous Seven, and “generous to a fault,” as McDaniel puts it, stops his pizza’s flight to his mouth in midair to inform me that he has the last piece; would I like it? I decide that Abdi, with his meticulous and, as Giordano puts it, “ebullient” artwork needs the energy more than I. “Abdi’s work makes you feel good,” enthuses Giordano. “It’s bright, just like he is.”
Other seniors, including Amy Reid in her red cowboy boots, sit on the coach perusing slides. “Amy’s thinking outside the box,” McDaniel says, explaining why she too deserved to win ARTS. “She likes ideas and she will do whatever it takes to push an idea,” Giordano expands. Pizzaless but happy, I plop down by Amy, who opens my sketchbook, truly interested in others’ artistic endeavors, and begins listing artists whom I should go home and Google.
“Shannon is another student who loves ideas,” Giordano says. “She brings another world to her work.” Shannon Wenker’s passion is mask-making, and after studying her slides, and discussing options with teachers, she decided to submit six masks out of her ten portfolio pieces. “I took a major risk,” she says of not submitting more “traditional” work, “so it was really satisfying when it paid off.” Wenker’s masks have been used in major dance performances, “so she’s inspiring other artists,” McDaniel gushes. “To the beat of her own drummer, that woman.”
Leah Fassbinder is another painter and sculptor, though she works primarily in clay. “Leah’s work has to do primarily with family and a certain sense of values that one could call wholesome,” explains Giordano. According to the ARTS website, “Above all, Leah credits her God, as she always aspires to use her talent for His honor and glory.” In the same vein, McDaniel notes that “this kind of spirit comes through in her work. Everything is symbolic. She’s just the Lovely and Divine Ms. Fassbinder.”
Andy Tanner may work in one less dimension than Wenker and Fassbinder, but his paintings display what McDaniel calls “an amazing ability to pick up on nuance and contrast. He has this vision, this clarity.” Tanner sums up his work by saying, “I try to paint light and color.” Giordano thinks Tanner’s most noteworthy work are his self-portraits; “they are really revealing; they’re very psychological.” Tanner plans to attend MICA for painting in the fall.
For obvious reasons (besides pizza shortages), some of Carver’s ARTS winners did not attend Dead Night. Hyman and Morozov are now attending college. Hyman, who is hard to picture without his grey Andy Warhol Campbell’s soup tee shirt and messenger bags spray-painted with homemade stencils, works primarily in oil on canvas and drawings on paper. He now attends MICA and says that he “expected to do well” in the ARTS awards and attributes it to the fact that he “usually [creates] a lot of related works at once. The work tends to gel pretty well.” Giordano explains that Hyman’s works are “touched in a way that just makes them come alive.” McDaniel refers to him as “Enigmatic Jeremy,” perhaps alluding to the fact that he’s the sort of quirky character to tell the ARTS website that he would like thank his foreign “host family” (for the record, Hyman never had a host family) or titling all of his works “Untitled” and not knowing which pieces won.
Morozov is famous for such arresting displays as a larger-than-life figure sculpted of melded plastic forks, or a giant piece of canvas splattered with dirt and a hypnotic spiral. “The thing about his work,” boasts Giordano, “is that he wants presence above all else. He really believes that if you put all of your energy into your work, your art will reflect that. A Dmitry piece is very powerful; very masculine.” Like Hyman, Morozov plans to attend MICA in the fall.
Each ARTS winner has individual strengths, but there are some qualities they all share. “ARTS is looking for a strong statement, made in an original way, a strong set of core skills, strong concepts and/or beauty,” says Giordano. The most common misconception seems to be that those who have the most technical skill win the awards, but McDaniel explains that “they’re not looking for who can do the best drawing; it’s about a vision, a passion.” As Trevor Packer implied, Carver may be the strongest art school “in the world.”
“That’s really what makes Carver Carver,” Giordano raves. “Because the work doesn’t look like it’s coming out of one teacher – here it looks like the works come out of the students’ brains. That was one of the goals when we started this school, to make it student-oriented.”
Carver has a long and decorated history with the ARTS awards. “Carver Center has been in existence since 1993,” explains Giordano. “We had our first seniors in ’95. The very first time we competed, we got a Presidential Scholar in the arts. That’s like if you were a brand new baseball team and the first time you went out, you won the World Series.”
Every year, McDaniel holds an ARTS party, in which many old and recent winners come to her home and discuss ARTS and art in general. “The party’s all about getting rid of the fear,” she says. “You have to know what to expect from ARTS.”
Giordano explains that nationwide, “twenty to twenty-five students in visual art are selected every year to go to Florida in the second week of January. It’s kind of a celebration and a competition at the same time. They’ll take master workshops with practicing artists, and many will be exposed to real artists for the first time.”
McDaniel says that most importantly, the trip to Florida, and the ARTS association in general, “is about validating the artists. It’s not about winning because they’ve already won. They will learn from each other and make important connections in the art community.”
Being an ARTS winner is an amazing honor, but then “some will be considered for Presidential Scholar,” explains Giordano. “If you are selected, you go to DC and meet with the president. You’ll be a part of this for the rest of your life. If the students become Presidential Scholar, they can name the most influential person to them; they can name any one – their mother, a middle school teacher, McDaniel was named a number of times; I was named once.”
And it’s true; the Fabulous Seven rave about McDaniel and Giordano. “They were invaluable to my development as an art student,” Hyman, who lived with them both for three weeks in the south of France last summer, acknowledges. “I thank Giordano for the long critiques, lunchtime conversations, and great artistic references. I thank McDaniel for allowing me to bother her classes, use her things, introducing me to alumni, and being my art mom.”
All of this support pays off when the students receive the letter from ARTS. ARTS has never sent seven letters to seven people from the same school in the history of the ARTS awards. Giordano expands, “When they pick the students to go to ARTS, they don’t know what school the winners go to. They don’t know names. It’s completely blind.”
On winning, Farrah divulges, “I know my art was competitive, but I feel so blessed and lucky to have won.” Reid feels similarly, saying in an interview on an Eyewitness News segment about Carvers’ success, “[The winners are] the top two percent, and I just didn’t think I’d be one of those people. It’s wonderful!”
McDaniel explains that as ARTS Dead Night comes to a close, the students are amazed by the quality of the work they’ve produced; “they go, ‘I didn’t know I had this work! I didn’t know it looked this good together!” Every one drives home, seven to national recognition.
Paraphrasing the emotions of teachers, classmates, families, and administrators, one particularly enthused Eyewitness news anchor exclaimed of Carver Center’s amazing seven-winner feat, “That is so cool!”