Hartland grad wins 'best in show' for international art competition on unsung heroes

HARTLAND — A recent graduate of Hartland High School, Breanna Zaborowski, was awarded the "High School Best in Show Award" and a $3,000 prize for her piece about Florence Kelley in the Lowell Milken Center for Unsung Heroes' Eighth Annual ARTEFFECT Competition.

"She is the most driven student that I've had, honestly in the past 20 years of my teaching," said Hartland High School Teacher Joshua Etheridge. "She's always going that extra step and spending hours and hours and hours outside of school, working on this stuff."

Over $16,000 in cash prizes was awarded to winning students across the high school and middle school divisions. According to a press release from Fort Scott, Kansas, the international competition challenges students to creatively interpret the stories of unsung heroes through original works of art accompanied by artist impact statements.

“The works of art submitted by our ARTEFFECT winners show their visionary thinking and the superior nature of their creative skills,” said LMC Chief Executive Officer Norm Conard. “Our team at the Lowell Milken Center for Unsung Heroes lauds the vivid imagination of these student champions and the excellence of their work.”

Zaborowski used mixed media to create "A Triple Threat" a portrait of Unsung Hero Florence Kelley with narrative elements. As a social reform activist, Kelley spent decades inspecting, advocating and lobbying for safer factories, after which she helped found the NAACP with W.E.B. Du Bois. Her work brought about the 1893 Factory Act, the first state law in the U.S. prohibiting employment of children under 14, and the Meat Inspection and Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906.

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"She reminded me of my grandmother," Zaborowski said. "She was a woman who didn't let her gender and her position define who she could help. She impacted so many lives and I just wanted to highlight that in my art no matter what, so I just had to do her.

"When I was looking up her pictures to see what she looked like, I saw they were all in black and white, so I wanted to make sure she was in color. I wanted her to pop out of the page and I wanted you to see her as a real person rather than just a photograph."

The Lowell Milken Center for Unsung Heroes, established in 2007, discovers, develops and communicates the stories of unsung heroes who have made a profound and positive impact on history, yet are largely unrecognized by contemporary generations. LMC has reached over 3 million students at 30,000 schools in all 50 states and countries around the world.

— Contact reporter Patricia Alvord at palvord@livingstondaily.com.

This article originally appeared on Livingston Daily: Hartland grad wins 'best in show' for international art competition on unsung heroes