DoWEA students show their skills in Smithsonian art contest

ALEXANDRIA, Va. – Each spring, students in DoWEA schools around the world showcase their artistic talents in the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM)’s art contest. This year, their artworks showed off the special qualities that make their communities worth celebrating.

The 2026 edition of the SAAM student art contest, now in its fourteenth year, drew 434 student submissions from 26 DoWEA schools across Germany, Japan, South Korea, and the United States. This year’s theme, Celebrating Culture & Community: Fairs, Festivals and Carnivals, invited students in grades K-12 to create an artwork celebrating the traditions, natural environment, or everyday life of their hometown or current community. This theme was inspired by SAAM’s current exhibition State Fairs: Growing American Craft, an exploration of artists’ contributions to the American tradition of state fairs, and by the craft competitions hosted at many of these fairs.

Participating teachers introduced the contest to their students through an asynchronous video lesson created by SAAM educators that taught students about the history of state fairs in the United States and explored some of the artworks featured in the Smithsonian’s Growing American Craft galleries. Students learned about crop art, a prominent tradition at the Minnesota State Fair, and saw SAAM’s very own butter cow, created by the Iowa State Fair’s official butter sculptor, Sarah Pratt. This video lesson gave students rich inspiration to draw on when choosing what elements of their own communities to embrace in their submissions. “The annual art contest is one of my favorite ways that SAAM works with us and our students, and when I saw the video for this year I knew our artists were going to be motivated.  I know I was personally excited to see the butter cow in real life, so I was not surprised that it was such a hit amongst our students!” said Emily Atkinson, Fine Arts Instructional System Specialist.

The international experiences of DoWEA students shone through in their contest entries. From Mardi Gras dresses and Japanese lantern festival scenes to circus tents and carousels, student artworks represented all manner of celebrations and cultural experiences. Fair food was a popular topic, and artworks featured delicious treats from around the world including tacos, bratwurst, churros, fried oreos, tanghulu, and the American state fair classic of apple pie.

Winners were selected through a two-stage voting process. First, SAAM staff in Washington, DC, voted to identify six semifinalists in each of four grade categories (K-2, 3-5, 6-8, and 9-12). Then, students in each participating classroom cast votes to select the gold, silver, and bronze winners. Each prizewinning student received a certificate, and teachers of students winning gold awards received a package of artmaking supplies for their classrooms. Winning artworks are displayed on SAAM’s website, and all entries can be viewed on SAAM’s Flickr page. 

SAAM is grateful to DoWEA teachers across many regions, grade levels, and content areas for creating space in their classrooms for their students’ creative expression. “The students enjoy opportunities that connect the DoWEA system as a whole,” said Nina Fiorucci, Visual Arts Teacher at Kadena Middle School. “We appreciate SAAM for acknowledging our military-connected students, and we love seeing fellow artwork from across the globe."

The annual art contest is just one of SAAM’s many offerings for DoWEA teachers. For over twenty years, SAAM has partnered with DoWEA to provide free custom teaching resources for DoWEA teachers. DoWEA teachers can request a variety of live and asynchronous resources, including arts-integrated videoconference lessons that align to their standards, taught by SAAM educators for schools in any time zone. Teachers who enjoy the art contest experience may also enjoy working with SAAM educators to design and host a student-curated exhibition within their own school, another of SAAM’s custom resource offerings. All resources can be requested in SAAM’s Schoology group.

“The Smithsonian American Art Museum is a wonderful partner for our classrooms, connecting every subject area and grade level to the visual arts in ways that are relevant to our students and spark their curiosity and imaginations,” Atkinson said. “This year’s contest entries and winners were so expressive and sometimes nostalgia-inducing.  Our visual arts students continue to impress me more every year.”

For teachers interested in participating in the 2026-2027 contest or in receiving the SAAM Schoology group code, contact Robin DeSantis, SAAM’s Distance Learning Educator, at DeSantisR@si.edu.

Below:

Grades 6-8 Gold Winner: Tanden, 8th grade, “The Aquarium”, Kadena Middle School, Kadena Air Base, Okinawa, Japan

Grades 9-12 Gold Winner: Skylar, 10th grade, “The Wandering Lantern Festival”, Zama Middle High School, Camp Zama, Japan

Grades 3-5 Gold Winner: Emeres, 3rd grade, “The Paper Pine”, Murray Elementary School, Fort Stewart, Georgia, USA