Windham High School students hope to turn wearable art into $50,000 in Vans shoe contest

Derek Kreider, Record-Courier
·3 min read
Windham seniors Zoey St. John, left, and Allen Noble-Williams, right, with Windham art teacher Lauryn Gintert, center, hold their custom designed Vans shoes.
Windham seniors Zoey St. John, left, and Allen Noble-Williams, right, with Windham art teacher Lauryn Gintert, center, hold their custom designed Vans shoes.

Windham High School has in its possession two pairs of shoes that could end up being worth $50,000.

In January, art teacher Lauryn Gintert submitted a proposal to the Vans shoe company to be one of the 200 high schools nationwide chosen to participate in the Vans High School Custom Culture competition. Ginteret's proposal was accepted.

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The rules are simple: If chosen, the school is sent two pairs of Vans shoes to customize according to the themes "Hometown Pride" and "VAN D(IY)Oren Legacy," the latter being an homage to the late Paul Van Doren, co-founder of the VANS shoe company who died last year. Entrants are asked to add to Van Doren's legacy by designing a shoe dedicated to VANS "four pillars:" action sports, art, music and street culture.

According to the contest page, the project was conceived as a way to encourage high school students in their creative efforts, and to call attention to dwindling funding for art programs in American schools.

Winners of the competition will be awarded $50,000 to their art department. An additional $15,000 will be awarded to the art programs of the top 5 runners-up.

Gintert would like to use the money to buy laptops that can run graphics programs for her students.

"We don't have anything that runs, like, Adobe. Plus you have to buy the Adobe suites, and stuff," she said. "Possibly get some of the bigger equipment, like a Glowforge [a precision laser cutter], or a sublimation machine [a printer used to transfer designs onto various materials] where the kids can start learning more industrial skills."

The two pairs of Vans shoes designed and hand painted for the Vans Custom Culture contest which put Windham High School in the top 50 finalists nationwide.
The two pairs of Vans shoes designed and hand painted for the Vans Custom Culture contest which put Windham High School in the top 50 finalists nationwide.

Seniors Zoey St. John and Allen Noble-Williams, along with Junior Jonni Burnside, spent the competition period decorating their shoes to fit the parameters of the contest. Their designs have put Windham High School onto the list of the top 50 finalists, an outcome everyone involved hoped for, but was in no way guaranteed.

"We didn't know what was going to happen," Williams said.

Using a combination of techniques, including acrylic pens, and the use of the STEM room's Glowforge, St. John and Williams have crafted two pairs of shoes into vivid representations of the contest's themes.

"We're very big here on Bomber pride," said St. John. The Hometown Pride pair of shoes features the front of Windham High School, the village's water tower, and 3D-printed bomber affixed to the right shoe. The back of the shoes read, "Windham Pride."

For the "VAN D(IY)Oren Legacy" shoe, Gintert said that they chose to focus on the intersection of art and street culture, paired with a graffiti-style font. Words like "accepting" and "kind" are scrawled as though by spray paint across a brick background.

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Windham's entries vary from some of the other submissions in that they're wearable pairs of shoes. Gintert said that some of the other school's submissions are engineered to the point that, while aesthetically pleasing, aren't practical to wear.

Now, it's up to the public to vote on which design is worthy of the $50,000 top prize, and the runners-up prizes. People can vote for their favorite entry until May 6 by clicking on the Vote Now button on the contest's webpage. All you need to do is enter a valid email address. People are allowed to vote once a day. Winners and runners-up will be announced May 9-20.

Winning the competition would be a boon to the high school's art department.

"Everyone's really diverse, so it will be able to help everybody get the materials they need, and be able to do what artwork they want," Noble-Williams said.

"We've been growing a lot lately," St. John said. "We've had a lot more opportunities to do different things in our program, so it would be cool to grow on that."

Contact reporter Derek Kreider at dkreider@gannett.com.

This article originally appeared on Record-Courier: Windham's art department enters Vans shoe contest worth $50,000