According to their website, The Texaco Children’s Art Competition is now the longest running visual arts sponsorship in Ireland since its foundation in 1954. It has even outlasted its similarly long running counterpart The Texaco Sportstars Awards (1958 – 2011) and is informally regarded as one of the most successful visual arts engagement programmes on the island of Ireland. Indeed, upon entering the Texaco website you are welcomed by a masthead ‘Valero, marketing Texaco in Ireland’ and are prompted to click on one of three buttons directly to the right of their logo: Texaco Children’s Art, Business Portal and Valero (the new name for Texaco’s amalgamation with the Chevron corporation in 2011).

Subsequently, this drawing Valero Energy Corporation Children’s Art Competition 1971 facilitates a line of questioning started in our forum meetings in September this year. Questions concerning accessibility, participation, exclusion and the difficulties of promoting public engagement within the visual arts. Upon reflection, it appears these questions are seemingly as applicable to multinational corporations as to publicly funded gallery spaces.

In this mathematically composed press image we see a little girl happily collecting her ‘gender appropriate’ prize from a panel of men and their wives. A photographer stands where we stand and snaps a photo that over 40 years will trickle down (slightly misshapen) into one of Ireland’s most established contemporary art galleries.

Created in response to this year’s student forum theme ‘Who is culture for?’ Valero Energy Corporation Children’s Art Competition 1971 seeks to question how visual culture is supported and disseminated in contemporary Irish culture and why.

Lauren Conway is a 2021 graduate of Art at IADT Dún Laoghaire. Through the use of archival materials, documentation from site visits, and found images from her teenage years, Conway uses the process of drawing to explore the experiences of second level education in Ireland. Selected group exhibitions include Under the seams runs the pain (2020), Ex Club x Ex Lab, Helsinki, cruxx.project (2021), Rathmichael Ring Fort and her graduate exhibition A Great Public Meeting, IADT On Show (2021). Her writings have been published in Bloomers Art Magazine, RHA Young Art Writers Zine, and in the online programme for cruxproject.net. She is currently a member of Ormond Art Studios, Dublin and is currently preparing for a solo exhibition in their project space this October.