Andrea Castaneda poses with her winning work, titled The Earth Belongs to No One
MONMOUTH, ILLINOIS (December 1, 2025) — Her first-ever trip to Mexico was a win in the game of life for Monmouth College senior Andrea Castaneda, as she visited the place she'd heard stories about all her life from her parents.
The trip also led to a trio of wins for Castaneda in the college's Annual Juried Student Art Exhibition. Included in those wins was a Best of Show honor for her painting The Earth Belongs to No One.
The work, Castaneda said, is meant to show that "you don't see any borders when you zoom out away from Earth. We're just a small little rock in an expanding universe."
A small little rock with two red push pins, though, as Castaneda marked her home in suburban Chicago and her parents' ancestral home in Zacatecas, Mexico.
Juror and Monmouth art alum Kendall Thompson ('17) also selected works by Castaneda as the top drawing of the exhibition and the top painting. The artist said her latter work, titled Recuerdos en Azul ("Memories in Blue"), was her favorite among her winning trio. It is a painting of a photograph she took at her grandfather's home on the last day of her visit to Zacatecas in 2024.
"It's the biggest painting I've ever done," said Castaneda. "I painted it differently than I normally do, and I was able to get a lot more details into it."
Castaneda's series of five self-portraits, each representing a different stage of Mexican history, won the drawing award at the exhibition
Her winning drawing, Raices ("Roots"), is a series of self-portraits that show Castaneda progressing through Mexico's history, each primarily black-and-white, but with a splash of color in a piece of jewelry or a ribbon in her hair.
"I started using a pop of color during my junior critique class," she said. "I realized I wanted to do more of that."
As a student at Dwight D Eisenhower High School in Blue Island, Illinois, the odds were long that Castaneda would attend Monmouth and study art, a discipline she dabbled in through sketches during the solitude of the pandemic. The first domino fell thanks to a steady stream of communication from the college's admission office.
"They sent a lot of e-mails," she said. "Before then, Monmouth had never been known to me. But I decided to check them out, and the next day I was at Monmouth on a tour with my parents."
Once she'd decided on Monmouth, an experience with the SOFIA program three weeks before the start of classes got Castaneda started on a path toward art, as her project was led by art professor Janis Wunderlich.
"I came in undecided," she said. "But for SOFIA, I worked on the mural downtown by the United Way building, and I began to see more of the art department. I met with Janis a lot after that, and I started taking her classes."
Before long, Castaneda made it official, choosing to major in art with a second major in Spanish. After she graduates in May, she plans to work for a year or two while building up her portfolio, then pursue a Master of Fine Arts degree. She might pursue museum-curation, thanks to the feeling she got when former art professor Brian Baugh gave her a 5,000-year-old artifact from the college's collection to hold.
"I held it, and I thought, 'This would be cool,'" she said. "It's been on my mind since then."
Three wins in one day is a pretty neat accomplishment, but Castaneda came into the awards reception with a victory already under her belt. The guest judge of her Friday afternoon art class, which ended just before the reception, was Monmouth President Patricia Draves, who named a work by Castaneda as her top pick for the class.
"I was already under a little buzz from that when I got to the reception," said Castaneda. "I was shocked to win three awards. I was hoping maybe for one, but then I just kept thinking, 'Oh, my goodness,' when he'd start walking toward one of my paintings. I got a little embarrassed, but it helped me realize my art is good. I'm my biggest critic."
The rest of the show
In introducing Thompson as the juror, art professor Stacy Lotz addressed the large audience, noting "It's great to see so many people" in the Len G Everett Gallery.
"It's quite an honor to be in this show," she added. "We don't have seventy-some prizes to give. The fact that you're in this show is a prize."
Interestingly, Lotz first met Thompson when he was four and participated alongside his brother in a program led by Lotz at the Galesburg Civic Art Center. Thompson has also led programs and taught art and, in a full circle moment, one of his former students had a piece in the juried exhibition.
"This is just one person's humble opinion," Thompson said before announcing the winners. "I submit to shows I don't get into all the time."
The rest of the winning works included:
Printmaking — Alyssa McCracken ('27) of Galesburg, Illinois
Digital Art — Eric Pio ('26) of Cedar Rapids, Iowa
Ceramics — Madison Hieser ('26) of Pekin, Illinois
Photography — Rose Tresch ('26) of Medinah, Illinois
Sculpture — Luke Reavis ('26) of Buena Vista, Colorado
