When the Kansas-based Lowell Milken Center for Unsung Heroes announced the nine winners of its 7th annual international ArtEffect Project competition, the list included an 11th grade student at Hopewell Valley Central High School.
Raelynn Cui, a student in teacher Lora Durr’s Studio Art III class, won second prize for her mixed-media painting, “Man Behind the Camera,” a portrait of photographer and activist Lewis Hine.
The ArtEffect Project challenges middle and high school students to honor unsung heroes with creativity and skill. The Lowell Milken Center selects each year’s unsung heroes, and students select the heroes they want to feature and create works of art based on what they learn about them.
The LMC awarded the $6,000 Grand Prize to Chloe Kim, a 10th grader at The Overlake School in Redmond, Washington. Kim’s digital artwork, “Will You Swim?” explores the courageous efforts of Irena Sendler, a Polish social worker who rescued hundreds of children from the Warsaw Ghetto during the Holocaust.
An additional $10,750 was awarded to eight other winning students across the high school and middle school divisions. Cui was one of two second prize winners, along with 11th grader Anne Jumper of Piedmont, California, and received $2,000.
“ArtEffect winners submit works of art that show visionary thinking and creative skills of a superior nature,” said LMC executive director Norm Conard. “We at the Lowell Milken Center for Unsung Heroes salute excellence and the active imagination of our student champions.”
The ArtEffect judging panel consisted of LMC’s executive leadership and notable figures in the art design world, including professionals from ArtCenter College of Design, California Institute of the Arts, and Claremont Graduate University.
In addition to taking home cash prizes the winning students will have their artwork showcased on LMC’s website and in LMC’s Hall of Unsung Heroes in Fort Scott, Kansas, a museum and research center.
Other unsung heroes featured in artworks by the students included actress Hedy Lamarr, who developed communication technology that helped prevent Nazis from intercepting classified messages during World War II; Muhammad ibn Musa Al-Khwarizmi, a 9th-century Persian mathematician; and Will Counts, a photographer who captured imagines of anger and violence during Arkansas’ 1950s public school desegregation.
Lewis Hine (1874-1940) was an American photographer who advocated for child-labor laws and fought for social justice. Cui’s painting includes a portrait of Hine, done in oil paint, along with a number of images of child laborer faces, which she illustrated using charcoal. The backdrop of the painting, also done in charcoal, is of factories and their smokestacks.
“What I did is an extension of what he was trying to do. In all his photographs he forced you to look at these kids. In a lot of them these kids are making direct eye contact so I tried to distill that in my painting,” Cui said. “Everything that I noticed in what he did in his photography is on the canvas.”
Cui said she chose Fine from among the Lowell Milken Center’s unsung heroes because she saw parallels between what he did with his photography and what she hopes to do with her art.
“He photographed children working in coal mines with the goal of highlighting child labor problems. He always focused on the people, he always focused on the children, and his photos often showed the kids looking right at the camera,” she says. “He was able to distill all of these unethical practices in these factory conditions in one photo, and that’s what I hope to do with my art.”
Durr knew about the ArtEffect competition because she had been asked to be a fellow of the Lowell Milken Center a few years ago. She had her Studio Art III students research the unsung heroes and write up brief reports about the subjects they chose to illustrate for the project.
“Raelynn is a really amazing kid,” Durr said. “She’s just a super hard worker, very serious about everything she does. With her, it’s challenging to me to figure out how to push her even further than she goes on her own.”
Durr, who is president of the Art Educators of New Jersey in addition to her work at CHS, said Cui’s initial sketches of Hine were mostly portraits of the man. The piece started to come together when Cui created an image that also shared all the details of why Hine was being recognized as an unsung hero.
Cui says she her use of charcoal as a medium is deliberate and part of the recognition of Hine’s work. “These kids were working in factories,” she says. “I wanted to choose a medium that was messy, where I could use my hands and could demonstrate the conditions in the factories.”
Durr says the use of charcoal also “creates this gorgeous sense of depth and contrast and emotion in the piece.”
The honor from the Lowell Milken Center was not the only art award that Cui has won this school year. The rising senior also won first prize in the Congressional Art Competition for her congressional district. Her landscape painting, “Vestiges of a Passerby,” will be on display in the Capitol next year.
Cui says she still thinks of art as a hobby more than a future vocation, but she says she hopes to continue creating art throughout her life.
She lives in Brandon Farms with her parents, Haiyin and Jingsong, and her younger brother, Sean. Haiyin is a software business analyst for a telecommunications company, and Jingsong is director of data science for a pharmaceutical company.
Hopewell Valley Central High School student Raelynn Cui with her award-winning painting of Lewis Hine.,
