Trivium Prep Seniors Win Big in Goodyear Mural Contest

Kassie Silva, a senior at Trivium Prep, was awarded a $10,000 scholarship when her design was selected for the NextEra Pluto Energy Storage Center community mural competition in partnership with Arizona Public Service, the city of Goodyear, and the West Valley Arts Council. Fellow artist, Trivium Prep senior, and friend, Miguel Ramirez, also entered and won second place.

Both Silva and Ramirez heard about the competition from their 12^th grade art teacher, Debra Goley, who encouraged her students to submit a design. Silva decided to apply, admitting that any opportunity to receive a scholarship was appealing to her. But she was also eager to return to one of her favorite mediums. “I’ve been so busy with senior year that I’ve lost time to paint, and I thought that the mural would be really fun to do, especially with it being a lot of painting,” she shared.

Silva said her original design was completely different from her final design that won her the scholarship. “My initial design was going to be different aspects of community and energy. It was kind of compiled together into a giant collage.” But in the end, the final design she landed on was a stylized rendering of the Grand Canyon with a cityscape of Phoenix in the background. “You can see how there’s this river of energy flowing through it,” she explained. “I settled on that design because I loved how bright the colors were and how the message wasn’t too in-your-face. You had to sit and think about it. I also decided to put a quote on it because I wanted there to be a takeaway.”

The quote she included in the mural design was, “SHINE LIGHT EVEN IN THE DARKEST PLACES.”

After finding out that her design had been selected, the real work began. Silva was tasked with taking her scaled down design and translating it into a full-size mural, measuring 16 feet wide by 8 feet tall.

“The only part that I really got help on was priming it… but for the most part, I painted the entire thing. I had a few friends offer me help but I wanted this to be an independent project since it was really important to me and I saw working on it by myself not only as a test of my independence, but also a test of how well I’m going to handle difficult things like this in college,” shared Silva, adding that this was by far the largest art piece she has painted.

Her finished piece was unveiled at the opening celebration of the Pluto Energy Storage Center, where you can find the mural today. Ramirez attended the unveiling to support his friend along with their art teacher who inspired them both. “Mrs. Goley is the one that showed us this opportunity. And without her guidance and support, I don’t think either of us would have really even thought about participating in something like this. But she really inspired us to keep it going and to really put ourselves out there,” he shared.

Silva believes that she has grown as an artist, due in part, to her classical education at Great Hearts. “I had a really great art teacher in seventh and eighth grade. He taught me a lot about different types of art styles. That’s how I found out what kind of art style I liked working with best. The different medias that we use in junior and senior year also helped me pick out which mixed media I like working with best. In my junior year, we experimented a lot with watercolor. I didn’t even know that I would like watercolor, but I love it now. So, I do think that with the different artforms that we work with at Great Hearts, it’s definitely prepared me for trying new things and… working on something so big like this mural.”

Silva, who also has a love for performing arts, will be using her scholarship next year at Arizona State University, where she plans to major in theater. We look forward to following her artistic career as she continues her lifelong pursuit of finding the Beauty in life beyond Great Hearts.

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