Empire State University Student Wins Best of SUNY Art Award 

(SARATOGA SPRINGS, NY – June 13, 2025) At the ripe age of 11, Caleb Rubright landed an opportunity to do something that few other tweens do: take a college course. 

“I actually entered an art competition, and I got to take a class at Monroe Community College (MCC) in 1991,” says the Rochester native, a visual arts student at Empire State University. “I remember walking into the college looking at all these 20-year-olds and being like, ‘Whoa, this is cool.’” 

It was a pencil drawing of a horse that earned Rubright his spot at MCC. And now, more than 30 years later, that same subject matter has garnered the longtime artist his latest accolade: a 2025 Best of SUNY art award, conferred during an in-person reception in Albany on May 30. Selected from pieces submitted by students throughout the SUNY system, Rubright’s acrylic-on-canvas painting “Wild Horses” was one of three works chosen for the award. Four other submissions received honorable mentions.  

“It was a big surprise … I did not expect to win knowing that I’d be competing against [students from] dedicated art schools,” says the painter, whose 4-by-6-foot creation also won a SUNY Empire student art competition last fall. “It’s an honor.” 

Rubright—who first discovered his interest in art as a middle schooler, when his aunt took him to a local exhibition—has always sketched and painted images of animals. The neon color scheme on display in “Wild Horses,” though, has become a staple of his work in recent years. He says he first experimented with it while creating a painting of a Great White shark for his son.  

“It was naturally colored, and it was just boring. So I started playing around with neon colors,” he says, adding that the cheery palette soon caught on with customers of the commission-based art business he ran prior to enrolling at SUNY Empire. “I wanted to make things that were happy and made people smile … that’s the whole reason why I paint.”