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banner art contest

By RANDY ERICKSON | Editor

Onalaska High School freshman Angel Thao’s professional art career is off to a good start. Last week, in fact, she collected her first check, $100 for designing a new year-round banner to hang in Onalaska’s downtown area.

The check came from Centering Onalaska, a volunteer group of residents and business owners dedicated to revitalizing the city’s historic downtown area centered on Main Street and Highway 35 (Second Avenue).

The downtown area has 34 decorative light poles with brackets for banners. Centering Onalaska has put seasonal banners on the poles for a number of years but was looking for a new design for a year-round banner to go on 17 of the poles.

Enter Onalaska High School art teacher Angie Hendrickson and her students. Hendrickson assigned all her students to come up with designs for the banner, and they had the option to enter them in the Centering Onalaska banner design contest.

In all, Centering Onalaska had 65 designs to choose from and picked Thao’s, which had a three-frame design partly inspired by the fall banners. One square shows family, one shows a shining sun and one shows a fish.

Believe it or not, she didn’t even realize that “sun” plus “fish” equals “sunfish,” Onalaska’s claim to fame.

“I wanted it to be plain and simple,” Thao said, which was just what Centering Onalaska was looking for. After all, the banners are meant in large part to make an impression on motorists without distracting them too much from their driving.

The new banners, like the old ones, are 20 inches wide and 48 inches tall and will be ready for hanging by the fall.

John Staut of Centering Onalaska said the group decided to recruit design help from the high school because members want the community to feel connected to the downtown and have a stake in the area’s future development.

The downtown and waterfront area, which has seen some development activity with the recent addition of Timber Square and Tequila Mexican Restaurant, will soon be seeing a lot more development. The improvements are expected to include a tourism/cultural center that city officials hope will become a national attraction filled with historical and archaeological treasures.

Meanwhile, Centering Onalaska members, city workers and a Charter Communications employee had a busy Wednesday this week, putting up the hanging flower baskets that have been a feature of the downtown area since 2003.