Gulliver Prep senior Elizabeth Vair is the Prep’s Silver Knight nominee in the Art category. Vair’s focus is on drawing figures and her favorite medium is charcoal and chalk pastels.
She is in the International Baccalaureate HL Art class where she has to put together a portfolio.
“My portfolio theme is How Women Are Sexually Portrayed in Art,” she says. “I focus on female figures.”
She has to create 11 pieces for the class.
“My pieces are different, a sideways look at feminism by looking at how women are portrayed in art,” she says.
Vair plans to continue taking art classes in college.
“I don’t know if it will be a major or a minor but I plan to continue,” she says. “I want to make a major, which will be a mix between international studies and environmental studies.”
She’ll attend Davidson in North Carolina, a small liberal arts college.
She is as passionate about the environment as she is about art.
“I am a Conservation Teen Scientist at ZooMiami,” she says. “I educate the public and raise awareness of environmental conservation, climate change, and increased natural disasters.”
She also educates the public about lesser known problems, such as the palm oil industry. It’s a problem in Southeast Asia and is a reason for an immense amount of deforestation.
“I wrote my extended essay on it,” she says. “One of many things we’ve learned at the zoo and one that has impacted me the most because of how prevalent it is around the world but few people have known about it.”
She goes to the zoo two days a month during the school year and spends 16 days out of there summer there. She joined the program because she likes animals.
“It was like the best of both worlds to me,” she says.
When she was younger, she attended art camps and a nature camp on Key Biscayne where she did conservation work.
At Gulliver, she is co-president of the Charitable Arts Club.
“We go to Overtown to do art with kids at Care Elementary School,” she says. “I have been doing the art program for the past four years.”
She’s one of the founding members of the Field Studies program, a research and conservation program. Club members travel to Bonaire to help restore coral reefs.
“I’ve done that in Bonaire before and here in South Florida,” she says.
This is the fourth year going to Bonaire (near the coast of Venezuela).
“Bonaire has had a huge influx of tourists and with all the cruise ships, the water has become polluted, the cruise ships have been knocking down the reef,” she says. “We glue or tie pieces of coral onto the reef. The reefs can restore themselves with a helping hand.”
They grow the pieces of coral in a protected part of the waters directly off of the shore.
Bonaire has also banned certain ingredients in sun screens that are harmful to coral reefs.
Vair also travels to the Keys to participate in a dolphin care program. She helps study their respiration rates and how rising ocean temps and acidification affects them.
Along with restoring coral reefs, they have also been going to area schools and doing talks about coral reef restoration.
The group hosted the first Miami Youth Climate Summit on March 9 at Florida International University.
She teaches at Breakthrough Miami, a program geared to helping kids who attend underperforming schools advance academically.
Vair teaches art classes in the summer, fifth grade social science and the engineering-based STEM workshops for fifth grade students.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
I am an Englishman that emigrated to Bonaire just over 30 years ago.
Thank you Elizabeth for the work that you are doing to help regrow our reefs. Thank you Linda for publishing this item.
It is hard to have any message about our problems published.
The damage to the coral that has been created by storms over the years, has been immense. One after another, several years apart.
Passing Hurricanes build up tremendous wave actions that smash entire coral fields to pieces. Lennie, Ivan, Omar were big ones and there have been several others too.