- November 21, 2024
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The artwork of a Flagler Palm Coast High School student will hang in the U.S. Capitol for a year.
FPC junior Isabella Curerri won first place for Florida’s sixth congressional district in the annual Congressional Art Competition, a national contest in which high school students submit their artwork to their local representative.
One piece is chosen per representative to hang at the Capitol for a year.
Curerri is a student of Ed Beckett, the photography and graphics design instructor at Flagler Palm Coast High School.
Beckett said that Curerri is one of his advanced students and has made a lot of progress this year.
“She’s worked really hard this year on developing the backgrounds to kind of help tell the story of her subject,” he said. “I really think that the background, the detail in the background … was probably the thing that kind of set it over the top.”
Curerri isn’t the only one of Beckett’s students to have won an art competition recently. Of five local competitions, including the congressional competition, Beckett’s students have won in all of them.
In the Crime Stoppers of Northeast Florida’s annual poster contest, three of Beckett’s students swept first, second and third for the high school competitions. Seventh Circuit State Attorney R.J. Larizza presented awards to the winning students at the May 17 Flagler County School Board meeting.
Beckett’s students also won the Flagler County Voter’s Guide cover contest and first and third place in the Palm Coast Garden Club’s poster contest. The winners were recognized by the School Board at the May 5 meeting.
Beckett’s students also won the Kids Ocean Day contest, hosted by the Friends of A1A. Normally, the competition only has one overall winner and one people’s choice. This year, Beckett said, the judges created a third award — an honorable mention people’s choice award — just because they could not decide between two.
Beckett said he treats these competitions like paid jobs for his students. The pieces, even if not chosen for submission into the competition, are graded on a rubric based on the competition’s criteria, he said.
“There’s never two alike,” he said. “We have a lot of really talented kids to come through there and do really well.”