This year, Keliy Anderson-Staley, a Houston-based artist and an Associate Professor of Photography and Digital Media at the University of Houston, was the juror. Anderson-Staley has been awarded numerous national grants, fellowships and awards including a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship. Anderson-Staley’s recent solo exhibition, Documents & Dwellings was on view at AMSET in the fall of 2022 which included a 10 by 10-foot house structure covered in over 560 tintype portraits, a selection of antique baking pans with emulsified images on their surfaces, and books and quilts made with prints and cyanotypes. Anderson-Staley’s current artworks display a unique and personal investigation into the definitions of home, family, and community.

In partnership with Lamar University Friends of the Arts, AMSET is able to offer the first, second and third prize winners scholarships to committed Lamar University art majors. Those awards increased this year to the semester-renewable amounts of: $1,000 for first place, $750 for second place and $500 for third place. Thanks to a generous bequest left by Stewart M. Chisum and Bessie Fisher Chisum in 2021, AMSET will be offering an additional $2,500 scholarship to the first place winner should they declare art as a major in any two or four year academic art program. 

In addition to scholarship awards, varying denominations of gift certificate monies are awarded in the following amounts: first place – $200, second place – $150, third place-$100, and honorable mentions – $50. The teacher of the first place winner will also receive $100 for classroom art supplies. These art supply awards are kindly provided by Blick Art Materials.

The Protégé Exhibition will be on view at AMSET until March 26, 2023.

Eligibility: This competition is open to all twelfth-grade students in Chambers, Hardin, Jasper, Jefferson, Liberty, Newton, Orange and Tyler counties.