The Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg Florida is devoted to Dali’s striking and bizarre works. The museum’s collection of 2,400 works includes 96 oil paintings, 200 watercolors and drawings, and more than 2,100 prints, photographs, posters, textiles, sculptures and “objets d’art”. (which are small decorative pieces.) Along with an extensive archival library. The Museum’s nonprofit mission “To care for and share its collection locally and internationally, is grounded by a commitment to education and sustained by a culture of philanthropy.”

   Every year since 1992 the Dali invites students to- “explore ideas and visions similar to those explored by Salvador Dalí and the surrealists.” By entering in its annual exhibit contest. 100 entries are accepted to be displayed for 4 months at the museum.  For 2021 the theme is “Delusions, Desires and Delicacies,” to encourage students to “explore these dream-like ideas inspired by our subconscious wants and fears”

   A statement on the student Exhibit homepage helps elucidate on the theme: “Delusions, Desires and Delicacies” encourages students to create dream-like visions and look to their dreams for inspiration. The definitions suggest possible approaches to the competition: a delusion is “a belief that is firmly maintained despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality…” Desire is “a strong feeling of wanting to have something or wishing for something to happen.” A delicacy is “something delightful or pleasing, especially a choice food considered with regard to its rarity, costliness.” Each definition suggests a possible approach for students to create their own “hand-painted dream photograph.” These three words encourage students to reflect on erroneous beliefs and fantasies associated with their dreams, while emphasizing the extravagance and opulence of their ideas.“

Grace Studdiford a Junior here at Newsome High School is one of the skilled artists selected to be displayed. Her piece titled: Growing Up is a collage featuring children encircled by a copious number of flowers, surrounded by a golden shimmering key hole.

”I chose the title growing up because it shows how children can thrive and grow in certain environments just like plants can.”

“A lot of my collages center around nature because when I flip through magazines I’m always just drawn to pictures of flowers and trees. I’ve always thought of nature as a very calming environment and I thought that it would work well with the overall message of the piece.”

”I was a little inspired by Dalí because of how his surrealist pieces all look like dreams. With my collage, I wanted to create my own little world that looked too good to be true and could only be dreamt about.”

“I first flipped through magazines to see what images I wanted to use and ripped out pages that interested me. Honestly one of the hardest parts of the process was choosing which pictures I’d be able to fit in the collages. I then cut out the individual flowers and people and then glued them down on another magazine page as a background. After that, I stuck it on to the keyhole boarder I drew with colored pencils. I then coated the whole thing in modge podge to make sure it didn’t rip.”

“In my spare time I mainly just do art, play tennis, listen to music, and hang out with my friends!”