Lilly Arndt, “Slipping Through My Fingers” (2025)
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 will reopen in Fall of 2026. Stay tuned!
Stevie Brooks, “Waves of Despair” (2025)
Water is changing Virginia in ways that now register at the scale of daily life. Higher tides, recurrent flooding, and saltwater intrusion are reshaping shorelines, neighborhoods, habitats, and the lived terms 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 and performative art, students are asked to explore the nature of sea level rise and flooding as the lived realities of their world. The contest asks participants to consider the questions of what water changes, what it leaves behind, and what forms of resilience, memory, and imagination begin to emerge as communities learn to live at the changing edge of water.
Categories
New categories in 2026; stay tuned!
Prizes
New prizes in 2026; stay tuned!
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.
For visual art, photographs may be submitted digitally, but artists whose work is selected for exhibition must be able to provide a printed version. Three-dimensional work should be submitted through photographs that show the piece from multiple angles clearly enough for review.
For recorded performative art, video submissions must be at least 30 seconds and no longer than 3 minutes. The performer should remain visible while performing.
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 Catch the King Arts & Appreciation Event on March 11, 2026.
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.
Contact
Questions may be sent to catchtheking[at]wetlandswatch.org.
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.
