2024 Protégé Competition and Exhibition

In its 38th year, the Protégé Competition and Exhibition, presented by Market Basket, was created specifically to encourage graduating high school seniors to begin taking the steps necessary to become a part of the world of art.

AMSET invites all twelfth-grade students to enter the 2024 Protégé Competition and Exhibition. Students preparing portfolios for admittance into art schools, or for future employment, may use this as an opportunity to develop professional skills. Entrants do not need to be enrolled in a formal art class at the time of entry. A juror will select a number of works to be exhibited; these artworks will tour the entire region.

Eligibility: This competition is open to all twelfth-grade students in Chambers, Hardin, Jasper, Jefferson, Liberty, Newton, Orange, and Tyler counties. Each student is limited to one entry. Artwork must be original to the student (no copies of posters, advertisements, or master artists’ work without proper credit).

Registration is now CLOSED for 2024.

For the 2024 Protégé Competition and Exhibition AMSET has selected photographer Keith Carter as juror. Keith Carter, a Beaumont-based fine art photographer and professor, is a gifted and insightful teacher who holds the Endowed Walles Chair of Art at Lamar University, where his numerous awards include the University’s highest teaching honors. Mr. Carter’s work has explored time, place, and vernacular culture across five continents for over fifty years. In addition, his work has been exhibited in over one hundred and twenty solo exhibitions in thirteen countries. A new monograph: Ghostlight, was published in 2022 and a fifty-year retrospective book, Keith Carter/Fifty Year, was published in 2018 by the University of Texas Press.

In partnership with Lamar University Friends of the Arts, AMSET is able to offer the first, second and third prize winners scholarships to committed Lamar University art majors. Those awards increased this year to the semester-renewable amounts of: $1,000 for first place, $750 for second place and $500 for third place. Thanks to a generous bequest left by Stewart M. Chisum and Bessie Fisher Chisum in 2021, AMSET will be offering an additional $2,500 scholarship to the first place winner should they declare art as a major in any two or four year academic art program.

In addition to scholarship awards, varying denominations of gift certificate monies are awarded in the following amounts: first place - $200, second place - $150, third place-$100, and honorable mentions - $50. The teacher of the first place winner will also receive $100 for classroom art supplies. These art supply awards are kindly provided by Blick Art Materials.

2024 Protégé Prospectus

2024 Timeline for Teachers

2024 Letters to Teachers

Additional funding is provided by the C. Homer and Edith Fuller Chambers Charitable Foundation, Wesley W. Washburn, M.D. and Lulu L. Smith, M.D. Endowment Fund, Blick Art Materials, the City of Beaumont, Texas Commission on the Arts, the Stewart M.Chisum and Bessie Fisher Chisum Scholarship Fund and the Department of Art of Lamar University through a donation by The Friends of the Arts.