Stella Cabot-Wilson is doing her name proud this year: first, she earned a Silver Medal for her Writing Portfolio (and in fact was the only Wyoming student to earn a National Award!); during National Events, one of her pieces — “I am a Word Lover” — will be among the 22 student works featured at The Actors Company Theater (TACT) on Saturday, June 2. And last weekend, she dazzled her hometown crowd by mounting a pop-up art show that tackled one of life’s largest questions: “What makes art, Art?”

“I am arguing that what makes an object art is the relationship between the artist and the audience and the communication between them,” she explained, and she gave the artists — from her community, family and friends around the country — a single inspiring concept: perspective. The show is a culminating event in her senior project at Jackson Hole Community School, and included a paper and experiential learning by volunteering at a local art gallery.

Thirty artists agreed to contribute works to the show, and their subjects ranged from Buddy Holly to a local landscape. As a 2011 ASAP award recipient, Stella attended pre-college at the California College of the Arts and some works in the show came from friends she made there. “The show is representative of the people I have met throughout my life,” she said. To read more about it, click on the article below:

I am a Word Lover

By Stella Cabot-Wilson, Age 18

I am a word-lover, first and foremost: I think PLACARD is an excellent word and ESTEEM makes me wrinkle my nose, but both of them have VALUE. Once I saw a slam-poetry competition and I felt like I was MELTING because their words were so HOT and they SLAMMED into me, like how I feel when I look into MIRRORS (that must be why it’s called slam-poetry). They made me RE-EXAMINE my face and my hand and the way that I BLUSH and turn away from MICROPHONES. My father WHISPERS while he reads, choosing the sentences he likes best so he can play with them in his LIPS and CHEEKS. My mother likes big words, like MATRILINEAL and ULULATION and she sighs when she has to edit them out of her manuscript sentences. I TINKER with WORDS. I like to PLAY with their meanings, and oh, how I love when they CONNECT like a Lincoln Log house. I am a GRAMMAR-FREAK but I do like it when people make grammar UNIQUE. I’d like to IMAGINE that when I see people walking down the street I see the words in their BRAINS and the words at their LIPS–I’d LIKE to tell you that, I really would. But I just see PEOPLE and the way they MOVE and the way they THINK–they are just people MOVING ON THE STREET. But when I hear, it’s WORDS I hear, when I think it’s WORDS I think, and when I paint it’s WORDS I paint. There are several things SPECIAL about words. FIRSTLY, they are BEAUTIFUL. Secondly, they can make you FEEL, make you feel like you are DROWNING or make you feel like you are FLYING. BUT THE MOST IMPORTANT THING ABOUT WORDS is that THEY CANNOT DO EVERYTHING. ALONE, THEY ARE FUTILE. It is US that set them AFIRE.