Savannah Knisley '15 wins Scholastic National Gold Medal

Jimmy Kelley
The Scholastic Art Awards showcase the best student artwork from around the country every year and annually, many Rivers students are honored at different levels of the competition.
The Scholastic Art Awards showcase the best student artwork from around the country every year and annually, many Rivers students are honored at different levels of the competition. 2014 is a particularly special year because for the sixth time in the last 25 years, a Rivers student earned a National Gold Medal for one of the best examples of student artwork in the country.
 
Savannah Knisley ’15 earned a National Gold Medal for her ceramic piece, entitled Incongruous Triad, and was the only student from Massachusetts to earn this top honor in the ceramics category. She is the first Rivers student to earn a National Gold Medal since Lindsey Ades ’14 and Natalie Schoen ‘16 did in 2012.
 
“The beauty of the piece was the direct result of Vannie diving into a very open-ended design challenge,” said ceramics teacher Tim Clark. “For the ‘Food Conveyance’ project, she decided she wanted to create a piece she could use to serve appetizers. The final product, Incongruous Triad, is both highly functional and wonderfully sculptural.”
 
Clark said that the complexity and variance of the individual structures within the piece contributed to the acclaim it received. Each element of the piece fit the broader structure but was still distinct in its form and glaze.
 
Art Department Chair David Saul believes that part of what makes for exceptional artwork such as this is a willingness to take risks. Savannah, who also earned a first place prize in drawing at the Small Independent School Art League (SISAL) competition, has an ability to excel in the arts due to her willingness to experiment in different mediums.
 
“It’s great to know a particular process or set of materials, be it 2-D or 3-D, but you might end up striving for perfection and get preoccupied by details,” Saul said. “But if you’re experimenting freely and have the ‘Why not try this’ attitude it can bring another element to the piece.”
 
To reach the national level of competition, Savannah’s piece had to first earn a Gold Key at the state level, an honor only about 6.5 percent of entries nationwide earned. From there, her piece was taken to New York City to be judged alongside nearly 16,000 state honorees from around the country.
 
The national panel honored 1,600 pieces with either a Silver Medal or Gold Medal with only about one-third of those honored earning Gold. The number of pieces earning a Gold Medal represented less than one half of a percent of the entries, making this an extremely prestigious honor.
 
Savannah’s piece will next be shown at the Johnson Center at the “Parsons The New School for Design” in New York on June 5 with the National Awards Ceremony taking place the next day at Carnegie Hall. It will then be part of a travelling exhibition titled “Art.Write.Now.Tour” which opens in Providence, R.I. in September 2014.
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