Aya Al Sabeh Earns Best of Show Award in Grandparent Portrait Exhibition

By Sally Hamilton / Special to VOICE

The Grandparent Portrait

SHOW, a biennial event, has become the signature exhibition for the Student Art Fund. Student artists in public junior high and high schools from Santa Barbara, Carpinteria, and Goleta pay tribute to their grandparents and significant elders by creating drawings, paintings, sculptures, and photographs that capture their portrait. The show originated in 2009 by members of the SBAA Student Art Fund Committee. Grandparent portraits were a regular part of founder Audie Love’s class curriculum at Dos Pueblos High School. When he heard that a student’s portrait had been prominently displayed at a memorial service, he was inspired to create a venue for the entire community to experience the significance of these portraits.

The 2023 Grandparent Portrait Show will be on display at the Faulkner Gallery at the Santa Barbara Public Library at 40 E. Anapamu Street, through April 27th. The exhibit is sponsored by grants from the Santa Barbara County Arts Council and Santa Barbara Beautiful, and Awards sponsored by twelve donors.

The Best of Show Award, sponsored by Santa Barbara Beautiful, went to Aya Al Sabeh, a senior in Kevin Gleason’s art class at Dos Pueblos High School. Aya and her family from her mother’s side of eleven brothers and sisters are the only ones to have moved to the USA. Most of the rest of the family lives in Lebanon. The gouache and colored pencil portrait of her grandfather shows him in his 40’s handsetting the type for a local newspaper.

“He is my model for living with a strong work ethic,” said Aya of her hardworking grandfather. Aya says she and her mother and grandmother looked through family photos to find this image and she enjoyed hearing their stories as they selected the photo she would use. Art is of prime importance to Aya. She has been accepted at Otis College of Art and Design and has received two scholarships, one a Presidential Scholarship.

This Eighth Biennial Grandparent Portrait Show contains 157 portraits, in various media, of grandparents or beloved elders. The exhibit was juried by Nicole Strasburg, who viewed images of all the entries and selected 13 awardwinning portraits and five honorable mentions. Strasberg, a well-known landscape artist, was once a student of Student Art Fund Founder Audie Love at Dos Pueblos High School.

The Grandparent Portrait Project is one that connects students with their family roots and pride. Getting students to focus on the faces of their grandparents is a way of strengthening those connections, and possibly, of inspiring the students with the hopes and aspirations that these grandparent figures have for them. The show has been celebrated for highlighting the wide diversity of cultures in Santa Barbara and for displaying the excellent quality of our public schools’ art instruction.