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Winner
Karen Osbrey, president of the Putnam Arts Council, shows Alyssa Arends' winning First Fridays poster, and her check.

Contest winner
PUTNAM — The Putnam Arts Council and the Putnam Business Association’s First Fridays Committee announced the winner of the 2018 First Fridays poster contest. This year’s winner is Woodstock Academy sophomore, Alyssa Arends.   Her interpretation of the 2018 theme, Mill Town Mosaics:  The Quiet Corner’s Cultural Heritage will serve as the cover art for the First Fridays program.
This year, the First Fridays Poster Contest invited local artists to create an original piece of artwork, inspired by the First Fridays theme. This season’s poster contest challenged participants to celebrate the six chosen cultures that make up the mosaic of northeastern Connecticut … Polish-American, African-American, French Canadian-American, Greek-American, Native-American and Scandinavian-American.  
Putnam Arts Council president Karen Osbrey said:  “It was a difficult choice.  We had so many beautiful works of art, using different mediums and capturing the essence of the theme in various ways.   But there can only be one winner and Alyssa’s piece was extremely thoughtful and creative, and captured the theme perfectly.”
Alyssa Arends attends The Woodstock Academy.  She is a tutor in the school’s writing center and she is very excited to take more writing electives in her junior year.  She also enjoys The Academy’s art classes, having already participated in Music Tech 1 and Art 1.