Letter: Apology to young artists

Unfortunately, we experienced technical difficulties with the submission tool for the Howe Sound Art Challenge, and we have lost some of the students’ artwork submissions.

Please accept our sincere apologies for any heartache this may have caused in your homes and classrooms. The tool looked like it was working, but we didn’t realize until Monday last week that it wasn’t accepting submissions over two megabytes or if a student (or teacher) uploaded multiple submissions. Initially, we believed that this had only affected a few submissions, but based on feedback from the community, it appears that there were a lot more submissions than we initially thought.

These issues have now been fixed, and the submission form is working properly.

We are heartbroken and feel so bad for the students!

Our volunteer web developer has been profusely apologizing as we realized the scope of the problem. We acknowledge the time, energy, and love that students have poured into their submissions, and it has been such a joy to see all this incredible artwork. We are so grateful to the teachers that have incorporated the Howe Sound Art Challenge into their classrooms and to the parents who encouraged their children to create and submit artwork at home. While the winners for this year have been chosen by a panel of volunteer judges, we would like to encourage the students to please resubmit their artwork so it can be celebrated. We have created an online gallery of all the submissions, which can be played as a slideshow.

Please note that there may be a slight delay before new submissions are displayed.

Because this page is now live, we need to approve each submission as it is uploaded to ensure that no one uploads photos not appropriate for children. Thank you so much for your understanding as we work out the kinks for this inaugural year of the Howe Sound Art Challenge.

We will learn from these mistakes and make sure that everything is fixed for next year!

We welcome any other suggestions for how we can make it easy for everyone to participate. We have been so inspired by the students’ talent and love for Howe Sound. We hope you enjoy the resulting artwork as much as we have.

Tracey Saxby

My Sea to Sky

Squamish

***Correction, June 18: In the photo caption Piper Kelly's artwork was incorrectly described as the winning piece. It's still a very lovely piece, however.