The Marisa Tufaro Foundation is honored to announce that Giselle Rodrigues, a student from Knollwood Elementary School in Piscataway, has been selected as one of six students from five different Middlesex County schools to receive a scholarship to attend a weeklong summer camp at Rutgers University’s Zimmerli Art Museum.
The third annual Marisa Tufaro Memorial Arts Scholarship has been made possible through donations to The Marisa Tufaro Foundation on behalf of a member of the Greater Middlesex Conference Baseball Coaches Association and others who wish to remain anonymous.
The scholarship entitles the students to attend a weeklong art camp this summer at the Zimmerli, where Marisa previously honed her craft and where her artwork was once displayed at an exhibit.
Giselle is a student of Knollwood Elementary School art teacher Beth Tripod. She is 9 years old. Giselle loves art, especially drawing, and also enjoys music and playing basketball. She is very much looking forward to enjoying cartooning and yarn work at the summer camp.
The Zimmerli Summer Art Camp allows artists of various ability levels to interact and study with some of New Jersey’s best teaching artists. Wes Sherman, who holds a Masters of Fine Arts degree from Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of the Arts and is a highly successful independent artist, heads the Summer Art Camp faculty.
“During the hot days of summer, the Zimmerli is the place to be for budding young artists,” reads a statement on the Rutgers University website. “Each year, new classes are added to stimulate, challenge and delight both veteran and newcomers who participate in the program. The Zimmerli continues to offer its popular classes in painting, drawing, pastels, watercolors, sculpture and an art ‘sampler’ class. Children also find inspiration in the museum’s collections as they explore the galleries.”
A representative of the Zimmerli Art Museum, who processed the registrations for seven previous Marisa Tufaro Memorial Arts Scholarship recipients, called the scholarship in her name a fitting tribute.
As a student at the Zimmerli in 2012, Marisa herself was the recipient of a generous art scholarship for her achievement in camp and based on her potential. Our foundation is honored to have an opportunity to pay that kindness forward.
Students who are Middlesex County residents between the ages of 7 and 14 are eligible for the scholarship. The application deadline for this year’s award was Feb. 1. Our scholarship committee selected the winners from a pool of candidates.
Scholarship applicants must share Marisa’s passion and talent for art. Only an art teacher from a student’s school can nominate scholarship candidates.
The camp runs on five successive weeks beginning July 1 and concluding August 2 (there is no camp on July 4). The scholarship recipients can elect to participate in either full-day or half-day sessions for any one of those weeks. The Zimmerli offers dozens of programs.
Edison High School baseball coach Vinnie Abene, who serves as the Greater Middlesex Conference Baseball Coaches Association’s president, said a coach from the league called him immediately after attending Marisa’s wake and proposed the idea of an arts scholarship.
“There are a lot of great guys in our association and there were a lot of ideas that were thrown around at the time,” Coach Abene said. “There was one particular coach that was really moved by what he saw at the wake with the amount of art projects that Marisa had accomplished and created. That truly inspired him to have a unique idea. He called me the same night as the wake and told me what his idea was, and he certainly made it a point that he wanted to keep it anonymous because it wasn’t about him. He just wanted to make sure that some worthy students would use the money toward an art scholarship.”
Marisa’s ambition was to attend an arts college, and while God’s plan did not allow her to make it to one, her work did. A piece Marisa constructed with a New York City School of Visual Arts graduate student during an art therapy session at New York Presbyterian’s Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital was displayed at the “Your Turn” exhibit at the college’s Flatiron Gallery in Manhattan one month after her untimely passing.