BERLIN — On Friday, when Berlin High School senior Daniel Rivera collects his diploma at graduation, it will be the second major honor he has received in as many weeks.
A painting by Rivera, titled “Tears of Miss Justice: Mourning a Broken System,” won the Best in Show award in the annual Democracy Collection Student Art Competition, sponsored by the National Art Education Association and the Art in Embassies program of the U.S. State Department. The school was notified last week via email that Rivera’s painting won the contest, said Berlin High art teacher Samantha Colbert, for whose class the work was made, but the announcement has not yet been posted online.
As part of the prize for winning the competition for artists ages 13 to 18, Rivera and Colbert will go to Washington in September for an event titled Art Activations for Democracy, being held at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. “Tears of Miss Justice” will become a permanent part of the Smithsonian’s Art in Embassies collection, giving it the potential to be shown in American embassies around the world, according to the Smithsonian’s website.
An acrylic-on-canvas work created over about five months this year, “Tears of Miss Justice” depicts a blindfolded woman who evokes Lady Justice, symbolic of judicial systems since Roman times. The image is monochrome except for a splash of blue over her left eye, from which tears trail, with red for the right eye and tears. The colors and their left-right placement make more explicit Rivera’s commentary on a current national divide, Colbert said.
“(Rivera) didn’t originally have the colors, but as we talked about how he saw this as a political statement, he decided on the red and blue for the two political parties,” Colbert said. The painting was made during her Intermediate Studio Class. At the beginning of the class, she provides broad general themes for…
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