Twelve Hundred dollars and a week of professional wall time was the award for three Island high school seniors who won the Martha’s Vineyard Arts Association scholarship given by the Old Sculpin Gallery. It is hard to know which is better: invaluable experience, or valuable resources.

This year the winners of the scholarship were Lonni Phillips, Naomi Scott and Maggie Howard.

On Sunday, there was an opening reception for this annual showing of the recipients of the scholarship; their exhibit runs until June 26.

“This weeklong show is a really great thing, because we actually help them with matting, framing, showing them how to present their work and how to hang their work,” said Melissa Breese, director of the Old Sculpin. “We worked all week long with them to make it look professional.”

Supporting Vineyard high schoolers is part of the gallery’s mission, Ms. Breese said.

The scholarship is in part funded by the Mary Drake Coles foundation.

“We also fundraise. Our annual fundraiser helps us get money to give to the students,” she said.

The artwork on display is diverse: some multimedia collage-like pieces, some interesting drawings, some paintings on pieces of driftwood. Each artist presented some potent and powerful work.

Paul Brissette, a visual arts teacher at the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School who attended the event, said that he never knows who is going to get the prestigious scholarship before it is given out. There were more than 30 students who applied for the scholarship, he said, and enough talent to make it impossible to know who would be chosen. The Old Sculpin selectors sometimes do call him up to confirm the legitimacy of the student’s interest in art before they award the scholarship, because they want the funds to go to young people who are committed to furthering their studies in the fine arts.

The three young women who won this year will be off to different places next year.

Ms. Howard will be going to Mount Holyoke college in Amherst, where she will study art, maybe to become an art teacher, she said.

Ms. Phillips will be attending the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and wants to pursue a double major in nursing and art. Although some of her artwork deals with the disenfranchised and the distraught (there was a painting of a Haitian face that she created soon after the earthquake in January), she says these dual interests are mostly unrelated.

Ms. Scott will be attending Dartmouth College next year, where she will study studio art and sociology.

The Old Sculpin Gallery generally shows a variety of work from its 45 members, a few of whom were recent Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School students. All of the members who get to show work at the gallery are Islanders. One member, Ben Scott, won the art association’s scholarship when he graduated from the high school. This year’s winners could potentially also win a membership in the future, although that decision would be made quite separately from the scholarship they have been awarded, said Ms. Breese.