Lillian Hoffa was still a bit excited.
Just the day before, the 18-year-old Twin Valley High School senior completed all the paperwork and requirements and was officially enrolled for the fall as a first-year student at the Art Institute of Chicago.
“It’s been my dream school for, like, ever,” Hoffa, the Reading Eagle’s Berks’ Best 2026 winner in visual arts, said while seated in the pottery studio at the high school. “I’m so excited to go there.”
But first, she has a goal to temper a few disappointments before setting out for the Midwest.
First, the disappointment.
“I didn’t even get to take all the art classes here,” she said. “I wish I could take more of them, but I just don’t have room in my schedule. There are so many and there’s so much to learn here.”
But that won’t stop her from her achieving one of her goals.
“There’s one medium I haven’t tried yet — glass,” she said.
Hoffa will be taking a glass course this summer at the GoggleWorks Center for the Arts in Reading.
It is her breadth of mediums, she believes, that got her into the Art Institute.
“I work with a lot of different mediums, which I think is one of the key aspects of my artistic career,” she said, “and I also tend to work with whatever I’m thinking of in my head, and my head is a crazy place.”
That helps her tap into a surrealist vibe, “kind of weird, funky stuff.”
She also likes working with wordplay and metaphors in her art.
“We did a project here that jumpstarted my love for word play,” she said. “We did a ’70s poster and you had to make the words the art, and I really liked how that came out because I can play a lot with that.”
Hoffa hopes to pursue a career in art education, and her love of all genres of the art world will help prepare her.
“With art education, you have to be well-rounded like that,” she said. “I can do so much. I can teach at least the basics for everything.”
Hoffa is looking forward to being immersed among other artists.
“I’m more influenced by the artists I work with,” she said. “I look around me and see other people who are better artists than I am and will take inspiration from them and try to do it myself.”
Hoffa is sure that art will always be a large part of her life.
“I feel like I haven’t really reached a peak yet when it comes to my art, and I don’t ever want to,” she said. “I want to just keep improving.”