A Gold Medal Portfolio Award is the highest honor students can receive in the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. Jurors choose portfolios by high school seniors whose works best represent the Scholastic Awards’ judging criteria: originality, technical skill, and the emergence of a personal vision or voice. These remarkable artists and writers will each receive a $10,000 scholarship.

For the next few weeks, we’ll be profiling the 2022 Gold Medal Portfolio recipients. Next up are Ashley Binstock and Lorie Chen.

Ashley Binstock

While writing my portfolio consisted of long hours of writing myself into a corner, struggling to see my way through plotlines, and convincing myself that every work was bad, I still like to think of it as a sort of happy accident. The way this portfolio came together was an unplanned miracle that challenged and changed the way I write, no matter what comes of it all in the end. Without specifically setting out to do so, I wrote a collection of works that highlighted the underlying issues and topics stirred up by the pandemic.

Golden Hour

FLASH FICTION

Ashley Binstock, Grade 12, Bishop Neumann Central High School, Wahoo, NE. Gold Medal Portfolio, Scholastic Inc. Writing Portfolio Award

Somewhere Before

The apartment steps sprawled before Cory, taunting her in the endless heat that stuck her strawberry-pink hair in slick spindles to her neck. August had come with a vengeance, soaking Minneapolis in the kind of sun that ricochets off of windshields like laser beams and melts skin into butter. She had spent the past month soaking in its rays and swimming with Sam in any and every city pool that wasn’t elbow-to-elbow with people. Cory watched a drop of sweat splatter on her not-so-white sneakers. The crystal bead an unwanted reminder that the season would soon draw to a close.

“You ready?” Mr. Doberman asked, smiling. His salt-and-pepper hair held clinging strands of sweat as he positioned the table for them to lift up the cement staircase. Mr. Doberman, who had been their neighbor for years. Who had helped them maneuver their own furniture when they first moved into the building. Their neighbor who drove Cory places when her parents couldn’t and who taught her how to paint a tree and then a cat and then her own mother. He had the kind of face that listened, the type of eyes that understood universes different from his own. It had only felt normal to help him move his new table up to his apartment. So when they brought it to the top of the empty staircase to rest, Cory didn’t think anything of it. Didn’t know what to do when his clammy hands closed around her waist. When she felt his hands slide over hers and lips press against her “No.” Couldn’t breathe, or move, or scream when suddenly he wasn’t the same person anymore. And afterward, neither was she.

Somehow After

The world was a better place at sunset. Hazy tones of honey red dipped into the earth, drenching everything in a rose shade. Cicadas pitched into a crescendo of glorious praise at the heavenly wash, and, suddenly, the earth began to turn again. But every sun eventually set against that limited horizon, and then night would come. Then the stifling heat of her family’s two-bedroom apartment would swallow her alive. Cory’s hands would dig tunnels through the sheets that swelled against her flesh in waves, sweat slipping down her cheeks in grimy drops. Words. Disgusting, haunting words would burn inside her ears until the flashing memories rumbled beneath the walls she’d buried them under.

Come on, don’t you trust me? I just want to have some fun. It’s not a big deal.

She didn’t dream. She never dreamed about him or the way her blood had curdled against his touch. She tried not to think about how long he waited to do what he did to her that night. So why then did the skin beneath her eyes deepen into sable half-moons? Why did the girl in her mirror tremble with disgust as if in some distorted way, the fault was hers? The rusted bleachers stretched out before Cory, her bronze ring dancing from finger to finger when her friend’s scrawny silhouette appeared from the corner of her eye, scattering the thoughts.

“You’re late,” Cory chided as Sam scrambled up the bleachers. The melting sun reflected in fractured rays that played across her dirty-blonde hair like piano keys. She was wearing her usual pair of jeans that hung in tattered webs at the bottom. Reaching Cory, she tossed a bag of Doritos into her lap.

“Who brought the snacks again?”

Cory rolled her eyes, her forehead creasing in disappointment when she noticed the label. Realizing her mistake, Sam plucked the blue bag of Doritos from her hands and gave her red before crashing back into a reclined position.

“So, what’s up with the hair?” she asked.

A sudden crunch of chips sounded from Cory’s palms as she made a conscious effort to relax her grip on the bag. She had dyed her hair again. A deep midnight blue that had managed to drown every ridiculous pink strand. It would have kept her awake at night, that taunting pink hair. It would have suffocated her with the smell of that stairwell and the lie of innocence. “Needed a change.”

“I like it,” Sam smiled. “It’s like I’m friends with a Smurf.”

Cory dipped her head until hair collected in front of her eyes in a cerulean veil. It was so stupid, sitting there with her friend and pretending to be normal. Listening to Sam call her a Smurf and aching, dying, to feel as human as she was. Fourteen was just a number she would see on street corners. Pink was a color that made her bend over toilet bowls. There had been something elemental in those hands that had erased parts of her. Somehow, some shift in the universe had distorted things. Somehow, being with her best friend in that moment was like breathing water. She wasn’t made up of the same atoms anymore.

“Ya, I guess so.” The sun seeped defiantly into the horizon and with it, Cory felt the forever goodbye of that golden hour.

Lorie Chen

The work in my portfolio serves to be a mirror for the mind, for the viewer to peer into their consciousness and analyze exactly why they believe and think the way they do while questioning the consequences of such beliefs.

Each piece would start from a photo of a mental composition and layers of drawing, washes of paint, monochrome, and rendered details would build on top of it.

Those rendering layers are where the magic happens. It’s where the little flourishes from brushstrokes and the color-coding are cemented, guiding the viewer towards possible meanings and questions the painting poses. The contrast of light glowing against a dark background as it flows out of the cup evokes the questions “what is going on?” and “what will happen?” Each brushstroke built questions that enveloped the subject.

Featured images: Lorie Chen, “You have to read this book.” and Ignorance Is…Acknowledge This, Painting. Grade 12, Troy High School, Troy, MI. Gold Medal Portfolio, Roome Fund Art Portfolio Award

To see more Gold Medal Portfolio recipients, past and present, visit our Eyes on the Prize series.