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 Deja Robinson and Tess Nelson.
Deja Robinson
My portfolio, A Mouthful of Bloody Teeth, is a depiction of what I experience as a black queer woman. Black writing is often seen as the minority critiquing the majority, i.e., black people pointing out the ignorance they face from non-people of color, but my goal for this collection of pieces was to show another side of black writing: the internalized critique of the community.
Suffering in Paris
PERSONAL ESSAY & MEMOIR
Deja Robinson, Grade 12, New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, New Orleans, LA. Gold Medal Portfolio, Alliance for Young Artists & Writers Writing Portfolio Award
Dion’s family owns a lake house out in the middle of the country. It isn’t anything special, just a wooden shack surrounded by trees and water. The whole nature scene was never really our thing, but I would tag along with her whenever she had to go up there because suffering is worse when you’re doing it alone. When she and I broke up, her family made it clear that I still had the right to suffer at the lake house whenever I wanted. I found a lot of comfort in that because her family had done a lot for me and I would often go to them when I needed an escape from my own home.
I started going to the lake house alone once the pandemic started because most of Dion’s family worked in the medical field and she herself was busy with college. Most people who know me wouldn’t think I’d be the one to willingly drive four hours just to sit in a wooden shack with no air-conditioning, but, after months of being in quarantine, I actually started to miss the loud crickets, the humid air, and the sound of wind brushing over the shallow water in the middle of the night. It was the only place I could go where I didn’t hear the sound of death tolls, survival rates, and politics. It allowed me to just close the door on the rest of the world for a while and sit and do nothing.
When I started reading Baldwin, I would often take my book up to the lake and imagine I was living in whatever the setting of his story was. Most of the time I’d be in ’60’s New York, sitting outside of an old Baptist church or in a tiny apartment in Harlem, or even just on a random beach.
I started to call the lake house itself “Paris,” inspired by Giovanni’s Room. Just like David, I put physical distance between myself and my problems. This place was for me what Paris was for him, and I found comfort in the correlation.
I don’t go to the lake house as much anymore because Dion came back a few months ago. She’s hiding out there because she doesn’t know how to tell her parents that she isn’t allowed back on her school’s campus. I thought I’d have a harder time with no longer having a getaway, but I think the real serenity came from being able to fully engulf myself in Baldwin and his works. I’m reading Just above My Head right now, and there are moments when I can still hear the motions of the water and the rustling of the trees. I don’t understand how we could have ever called that feeling “suffering.” I wonder if Dion has also changed her mind about it now that she’s been alone there for so long. I wonder if she still thinks about all those days we spent there suffering. She has a bigger problem eating away at her now, ones bigger than crickets or mosquitoes. But at least she is in Paris. Suffering alone in Paris is better than just plain suffering.
Tess Nelson
In my portfolio, I explore both concepts of morality and mental health. Each painting dealt with one or multiple of my own personal fears. What they look like to me, how they affect me, and, most importantly, why I fear them. My chosen subjects are addiction, adulthood, loneliness, rejection, war, religion, and sexuality, many of which I find tie into each other. I was very intentional with the symbolism I used to represent each fear.
The most personal was my piece Happy Birthday, a self-portrait that explores multiple of my aforementioned themes. Entering an adult world that I feel unprepared for. The fear of what will happen if I fail, addiction, disappointment. Sex, and what that means to me.
Featured images: Tess Nelson, All Eyes on Me and Happy Birthday, Digital Art. Grade 12, Performing Institute of Minnesota Arts High School, Eden Prairie, MN. Gold Medal Portfolio, Jill and Peter Kraus Art Portfolio Award
To see more Gold Medal Portfolio recipients, past and present, visit our Eyes on the Prize series.