On five Thursday afternoons during the winter of 2024 / 25, the cafeteria at Stratford School’s Osgood campus looked less like a lunchroom and more like a workshop. Sixty students hunched over sketch pads and their artwork, racing a 90-minute clock in an elimination-style art contest called “The Convergence of Creativity.” Fifteen-year-old Daniel Gao, a sophomore at Irvington High School, hosted the event. In preparation, he spent two long years planning, recruiting judges, and persuading sponsors to back his eighth grade idea.
Gao’s guiding theme—turning emotions into artwork—framed every round. The prompts mainly surrounded mental health, asking contestants to interpret feeling anxiety, calmness, happiness, and more into their art. After each timed session, rotating panels of teachers and local artists halved the field until two finalists remained.
“I wanted students to explore these aspects of themselves to develop as people,” said Gao. “That’s something important that younger students and generations need to recognize today.”
Beyond his creativity and innovation, the success of Gao’s event also relied on the people he worked with. As a communications director at Youth4Good—an East Bay non-profit that works to serve the low-income and unhoused community—he looked within his close network of student volunteers and found people to help work the event. He also contacted Friends of Children with Special Needs in the early stages of planning, working with them for promotion and sponsoring, and fundraising for them in exchange.
California Art Supply Company owner Ron Ansley was another prominent sponsor and an early believer in the event’s potential impact, and supplied all the prizes and medals.
“Daniel did all the work for this event…we participated in the event based on Daniel’s enthusiasm and efforts, and of course the fact we love supporting the local community when we can,” said Ansley. “Normally we wouldn’t have participated in an event as far away as Daniel’s event, but it sounded like a good cause and we thought it would be something the participants would enjoy.”
That enjoyment, coupled with skill, was on display throughout the competition, with Stratford eighth-grader Maggie Hu showing off her talents as one of the finalists.
“Usually with a lot of my art projects I have a lot of time to pick up ideas,” she said. “But with these prompts, I really learned how to think and describe the moment and not like veer away from that thought or prompt that I was going for, and I think that’s pretty useful.”
Beyond trophies, giving back, authenticity, and appreciation of the arts were the event’s main goals. While choosing sponsors and partners, he went on a search for small businesses and local art stores exclusively. On top of that, Gao dedicated himself to creating handmade art calendars and selling them at the event, amounting to a total of $100 for 20 calendars sold.
“I wanted to support small businesses, particularly local art stores, because the rise in online shopping really damaged them and hurt their business,” he said.
Whether “Convergence of Creativity” returns next year is still up in the air, but Gao is already thinking of how version 2.0 would go: new themes, more campuses, and bigger charitable goals. Hu, for one, says she is ready to sign up should the opportunity come up again—especially if it expanded its artistic scope.
“I would come back because I really love doing art, and I like letting my creativity flow, not only just through [visual] art too, but also other forms of art like poetry and writing,” she said. “I genuinely enjoy creating art.”
