Art has always been very personal for Keny’ce Lawson. The Woodland Hills High School senior has used it as an outlet from an early age.
“I put most of my heart into my art. I’ll get really sentimental if I lose a sketchbook or something,” she added. “I turn to art for a lot of things. Just to either clear my mind, just get my creative juices going, or if I feel like I’m having a hard time in school, I'll take a break from school entirely, and I'll just keep drawing. I'll just sit in my room and draw.”
For that reason, she’s often been hesitant to share her art publicly.
“I'm not used to putting my artwork out there,” she said. “I keep it to myself. It's my thing.”
That changed on Friday, March 13, as hundreds of her peers from high schools around the region saw her art on display as part of the Woodland Hills Student Summit at Penn State Greater Allegheny. Lawson teamed up with high school teacher Paul Beard to design the mural for the seventh annual summit.
Lawson’s challenge was to create 11 separate pieces of art that reflected the various topics being discussed by the students at the summit. Those drawings were then placed inside frames and mounted to the woodwork on the mural. The entire piece was on display throughout the day.
Her involvement in the project began in a class with Mr. Beard earlier this year. He approached her about creating pieces of art for something he was building for the Student Summit.
“I was like, ‘Sure, why not?’ And then he said there was like 12 pieces and 20-something schools, and I was like, ‘Oh!” Lawson recalled.
The duo explored a couple of ideas, including a giant puzzle that was scrapped because of the number of schools involved. They eventually settled on the large mural featuring the individual art pieces.
Over the next few months, she and Mr. Beard worked away at their project. Mr. Beard used his woodworking skills to create the frame and mount it on a transportable display. He also etched blocks with the names of each of the participating schools and secured picture frames in strategic locations on the piece. In the center of the mural, he mounted the logo for this year’s summit that was created by 2025 Belle Vernon graduate Luciano Lopez, who was a leader for several years.
Lawson, meanwhile, focused on the pieces of art for each of the 11 topics. She drew inspiration from Pinterest and other internet searches, as well as from her own life. For the Social Media topic, for example, she was inspired by the diverse student body that she sees every day in the halls at Woodland Hills.
“I tried to include everyone in it because it’s social media – everyone is on it,” she said.
She started each piece with pencil and paper and then moved to her iPad to refine the details. She went back to paper for the final drawing.
“I like staying physical, traditional. Sometimes I feel like doing it online takes the soul out of it,” Lawson said. “Sure, you’re still putting your heart into it, but I like feeling it on paper.”
Lawson used alcohol markers and paint markers for the final pieces, along with pencil. Most of the images are in black and white, though several have splashes of color.
“I tried to keep it black and white, just to simplify things for myself,” she said, “because I'm not the greatest with colors, so I'm not going sit there and ruin a good art piece with colors that I don't know how to use.”
As nerve-wracking as it has been to have her art on display publicly, Lawson is happy that others have been able to see it.
Lawson shared that a piece of hers was on display last year at an art competition at the Kamin Science Center. She wasn’t able to attend, so her art teacher sent a photo of the display.
“It was so pretty, too. It had this nice little background and everything,” Lawson said. “I was sad that I couldn’t go, because I wanted to have the human interaction of how people would see it.”
Her art teachers have also put her work into the annual Woodland Hills School District Art Show each spring. But there is a difference between those displays and having people directly interact with her art while she was in attendance, as she was at the Student Summit.
“It was insightful on what people go through,” Lawson said of experiencing the Summit after creating the art. “I was trying to convey it from other people's perspectives and how they would probably see things, try to make it about them and not me.”
“They all mean a lot, but the AI one just hits me. There’s a lot of AI stuff going on, either raising prices or taking people’s jobs, and I feel like there needs to be something human about it. You can’t just put in a prompt and expect people to figure out their soul behind it. It’s always good to have human mistakes, but having so many mistakes in a piece where you can tell it’s AI kind of takes the soul out of it.”
The mural she created with Mr. Beard has that soul. It reflects the passion and commitment of everyone associated with the Student Summit, and the confidence Lawson now has from showing her art to her peers and to the community.
“This is my first real experience having a lot of people see my stuff,” she said. “It was like, ‘Wow. I did that!”