LINDSBORG – The annual Bethany College Messiah Festival Juried Student Art Exhibition starts March 16 and will continue through April 17 in the Mingenback Art Center gallery on the corner of Olsson and Second Street on the Bethany College campus. The show will exhibit local women artists from the Sandzen Collection as well as Bethany College students. 

Featured works for this year’s student exhibition were chosen by juror, Valerie Haring. Valerie is a life-long Kansan and currently the chair of the Art Department at Butler Community College, where she attended as an undergraduate and has taught for nearly 30 years. She earned her BSE from Emporia State University and an MA from Wichita State University. Valerie is a painter who also creates assemblages, sculpture, photography, and digital prints. She traces her interest in art from her childhood, where she loved to “find” objects and assemble odds-and-ends into artistic creations. In her current work Valerie utilizes a striped composition and her intellectual, personal, and artistic discoveries are manifest in the artwork she makes. 

Works may be submitted by any student, so long as the work was created since the last Messiah Exhibition. Work can be submitted for 2D, 3D, Design/Photography, or Digital Arts categories.

Best of Show will be awarded to Katherine Fowler, for Branch Teapot, and Best of 2D to Lydia Nicholson, for Frog Melody. The Best of 3D award will go to Zephra Rice, for Rainforest Tea Set. Several other awards will be announced at the Juried Student Art Exhibition awards ceremony reception at 4:30 p.m., April 5 at the Mingenback Art Center gallery. 

The Juried Student Art Exhibition is part of the Messiah Festival of the Arts (www.messiahfestival.org), the celebration of sacred music, theatre and art at Bethany College. Every year since 1882, the Bethany Oratorio Society has presented Messiah at the college. The society has performed Messiah across the plains, in Carnegie Hall, and on national television.