Lilly Arndt, “Slipping Through My Fingers” (2025)
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Tides of Tomorrow:
The Jane Brinkley Thumm
Memorial Arts Contest
A statewide arts contest for Virginia high school students responding to the lived experience of sea level rise, flooding, and life at the changing edge of water.
Submissions for 2026-2027 are due February 8th, 2027 at 11:59pm!
Stevie Brooks, “Waves of Despair” (2025)
Water is changing Virginia in ways that are now felt at the scale of daily life. Higher tides, recurrent flooding, and saltwater intrusion are reshaping shorelines, neighborhoods, habitats, and the daily lives of communities across the Commonwealth. These pressures carry environmental consequences, but they also reach into civic life, local culture, and the habits of place.
Tides of Tomorrow invites high school artists across Virginia to enter this landscape with seriousness, creativity, and care. Through visual artwork, students are asked to explore the nature of sea level rise and flooding as the lived realities of their world. Participants are encouraged to capture how humans influence the land, how the land is changing in response, and the resilience of life on the edge of a rising sea. By translating these urgent issues into art, we inspire awareness, spark dialogue, and envision a future where both nature and humanity thrive in harmony.
Categories
Students are encouraged to submit artwork in one or all three of the following visual art categories:
3-Dimensional Art
2-Dimensional Art
Photography
*Acceptable media types for each category can be found under the Guidelines section below.
Prizes
The first-place winner in each category will receive $300!
Eligibility
The contest is open to high school students across Virginia.
Guidelines
Each artist may submit up to three pieces total, whether in one medium or across several.
Media accepted for the given categories may include: sculptures and glasswork (3-D Artwork); drawings, paintings, textiles, printmaking, etc. (2-D Artwork); film, camera, or drone images (Photography).
Photographs may be submitted digitally and will be featured digitally alongside all submissions. Artists who wish to feature their work in the physical exhibition must supply their own printed piece.
A given student is only eligible to win first place in up to one category. All artwork submitted must be the original work of the student submitting it. The use of generative AI to produce artwork for this contest is prohibited.
The strongest submissions will show a sharpened way of seeing: attention to the marks water leaves on a place, the pressures it places on community life, and the unexpected forms of endurance that gather in response. What matters here is not only artistic skill, but the ability to make a viewer feel that a real world is being observed, remembered, and reimagined.
Exhibition
All visual art submissions are invited to be displayed during the annual Catch the King Arts & Appreciation Event.
The exhibition is intended not only as a celebration of student work, but as part of a broader public conversation about living with water in Virginia.
The next student art exhibition will take place in Spring 2027.
Who was Jane Brinkley Thumm?
Jane Brinkley Thumm, a Norfolk native, was a local artist whose work moved easily across media while remaining deeply grounded in the places she knew. Art was a lifelong interest for Thumm, and it became an especially full expression in her later years. She continued painting well into her nineties.
She was known for paintings of the Festival in Ghent and the 10th anniversary of Waterside, and for her depictions of homes, family places, and landscapes across southern Virginia. Thumm also taught art classes for several years at the Norfolk Senior Center, sharing both her skill and her love of the work with others.
This contest is offered in her memory and in recognition of the kind of attention her work embodied: careful attention, openness to form, and a lasting connection to place.
We are grateful to the Thumm/Mayfield family for their support of Catch the King and for making this memorial contest possible.
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