— Kyle Pectol, Riverton

The high school show is one of Jacobsen's favorites because of the variety, but also because of the potential it represents.

It's fun to see what the students are doing at the beginning of what might be an artist's career, he says. Not all the students will become commercial successes, of course, and may not even want to. But they will have a lifelong interest in and appreciation of art that will enrich their lives, he says.

This is Jacobsen's third show as the museum's curator of education, and each year it gets harder to make his own choice for the Director's Award. There's something to love about every piece, he says, whether it is the amazing detail that Amy Henderson puts into her pencil drawing, or the way Jordan Reading placed a bead in the beak of his ceramic toucan bird, or how Tess Graham created a self-portrait that doesn't fit the "standard nose-eye-mouth" mold.

He loves the "V-ate, V-drank, V-got-sick" and other humor found inside Jill Osborne's "Eat Real Food" painting. The texture of Tyler Cox's pottery "rivals anything I've seen done professionally."