Raley Schweinfurth

Three Oregon students, including a noted bee death investigator and a prize-winning artist whose paintings address racial inequities head-on, were named Oregon's Presidential Scholars on Tuesday.

Raley Schweinfurth, a senior at Oregon Episcopal School, and Brian Josephson of South Medford High are the top female and male high school seniors in Oregon this year, a five-person White House commission decided.

Ameya Okamoto, a senior at Catlin Gabel High, was one of 20 Presidential Scholars in the Arts chosen nationwide.

Brian Josephson

In addition to Okamoto's artistic excellence, all three winners were chosen based on academic success, essays, transcripts, community service, leadership and demonstrated commitment to high ideals.

Schweinfurth, an accomplished pianist, placed 10th in the nation's oldest and most prestigious science contest for high school seniors in March. She won for her research into bee die-offs and ways to rid soil of the toxic chemicals responsible. She is headed to Columbia University, where she plans to double major in environmental chemistry and music.

Josephson is very politically active and served as the statewide president of DECA, a competitive high school entrepreneurial club. He will attend the University of Oregon. Neither he nor officials at his school responded to requests for interviews Tuesday.

Ameya Okamoto creates digital protest artwork. Her work has included, from left, a portrait of MAX stabbing victim Taliesin Namkai-Meche, Parkland anti-gun activist Emma Gonzalez and Quannice Hayes, a 17-year-old fatally shot by Portland police.

Okamoto's digital artworks have been exhibited at the Portland Art Museum and won national honors in the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards three years straight. Her subjects are almost always related to racial identity, controversy and healing, including a victim of Portland's hatred-laced fatal MAX stabbing and the 2017 police shooting death of black teen Quanice Hayes. Creating the latter, made of a 17-year-old when she was also 17, was "so personal and the fastest I have ever worked."

Ameya Okomoto paints a portion of the mural being created in honor of MAX stabbing victims and survivors.

Okamoto, who moved to Portland from New York City at age 7, said the switch to living in the whitest big city in America was jarring. She credits her mother with nurturing her strong commitment to social justice and racial equity. No longer in contact with her biological father, Okamoto says she grew to view two gay men in Portland as her father figures. That helped spurr her first activism, on LGBTQ issues when she was in middle school, she said.

Okamoto said Terresa Raiford of the group Don't Shoot Portland helped her find her place making protest art, much of it tied to the Black Lives Matter movement, and to help promote healing with her uplifting and tender memorial portraits of the victims of violence.

Artist Sarah Farahat designed this large mural for the Hollywood MAX station and, having seen Ameya Okomoto's work, invited the girl to help her paint it into reality. Okamoto said Farahat did not realize at the the time that Okomoto was still in high school.

For her senior project, Okamoto is helping artist Sarah Farahat complete her large mural at the Hollywood MAX station to recognize victims and survivors of the stabbing. She said working on the project is the complete opposite of how she had normally done her work, which was very private. Painting day after day as people come and go on their MAX trips about town has helped her claim a public indentity as an artist, she said.

Okamoto will attend Tufts University where she has been admitted to a program leading to both a bachelor's of arts and a bachelor's of fine arts. She plans to major in psychology and race and justice and in interdisciplinary art.

-- Betsy Hammond