Two Lakewood High School students – sophomores Cayla Lyman and Alessandra Williams-Kemmerer – have had their artwork chosen to be displayed in the Salvador Dali Museum in the Pinellas County Student Surrealist Art Exhibit.

“I feel really excited and it’s going to be a great experience. I’m really happy that my art was picked,” Lyman said.

Williams-Kemmerer said being chosen for the honor was “unreal.”

“I honestly don’t know what to say. It is incredible that my art would be exhibited in a museum,” Williams-Kemmerer said.

When she visited the Dali to see her artwork on the wall, she said she felt a little overwhelmed.

“I didn’t feel deserving of it,” she said. “I go in there and there were a lot of cool pieces that I really liked and looking at them I’m like, ‘How did I get it?’”

The annual show is being exhibited in The Dali’s Raymond James Community Room.  The students who are selected are seventh through 12th graders. There was an open house reception on Feb. 1 from 6:30-8:30 p.m. at the museum, 1 Dali Blvd, St. Petersburg.  The student exhibit will be up until March 6. Tickets cost $20.

The students submit their work to the Dali Museum and a panel of jurors, which are made up of teachers and artists, do an initial pick of works, art teacher Sandra Bourne said. Then the museum director picks the final pieces that go into the exhibit. There were 314 pieces that were picked from Pinellas County. The art must be surreal, meaning that it must be dreamlike, unusual, altered and distorted.

“It can’t just be realism. It’s got to be surreal,” art teacher Sandra Bourne said.

Bourne said she was excited to attend the Feb. 1 event with one of her winning students, Williams-Kemmerer.

“I got to go upstairs and look at the work with my student.  Who gets to do that?” she said. “That’s why it’s awesome.”

Judges award the student work in different categories, including Best of Show and Honorable Mention.

“We didn’t get one of those,” Bourne said. “But we’re just happy to be in the show.”