Nine Westport Winners in Silvermine Arts School Exhibition

Nine Westport art students won awards at the recent Silvermine School of Art Exhibition, open to anyone who completed at least a full term of art classes at the school just over the border in New Canaan.

Awards were given in adult and youth categories and across various types of media, from painting and drawing to ceramics, digital imaging, and metalwork.

These Westport students won awards:

• In the adult category, for jewelry, Bobbie Liepolt won a first prize for “Shapes.”
• Also in the adult category, for mixed media, Melissa Newman won a first prize for an untitled work.
• Another first prize in the adult category, this one for photography, went to Ellen Tsangaris for “Bones.”
• One of four Jean S. Holland Awards was given to Jennifer Williams for her watercolor “Will’s St. John.”
• Honorable mention in the adult category, for ceramics, went to Claudia Besen.
• Eva Horowitz also won an honorable mention in the adult category for a mixed media work.
• In the “Youth” category (for ages 10 to 17), in collage, Diana Hoffman won a first prize for “A Different Perspective.”
• Olivia Porretta (pictured) won a Youth category first prize in drawing for “Sad Man.”
• Also in the Youth category, for sculpture, Josephine Freedman won a first prize for “La Ballena.”

The Best in Show Award went to Elaine Leegstra of Greenwich for her oil painting entitled “Here’s Looking at You.”

The judge of this year’s exhibition, the 25th the school has put on, was Beth Livensperger, who lives and works in Queens, NY, who has exhibited nationally and internationally, includingin New York, Philadelphia, Providence, RI, Santa Monica, CA and Seoul.

Livensperger is a former Aldrich Museum Radius Fellow and has done residencies at the Weir Farm, Vermont Studio Center, and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. In 2010-2011 she was an artist-in-residence at the Abrons Art Center in Manhattan.

She currently teaches painting and drawing at SUNY Purchase. Livensperger holds a bachelor’s of fine arts degree from the Cooper Union and a master of fine arts degree from the Yale University School of Art.

Picture (contributed by Silvermine School of Art), Olivia Porretta of Westport, who won a first prize in the Youth category for her drawing, “Sad Man.”