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, skill, and the emergence of a personal vision or voice. These remarkable artists and writers will each receive a $12,500 scholarship.
For the next few weeks, we’ll be profiling the 2024 Gold Medal Portfolio recipients. Next up are Beverly Zheng and Isa Nava.
Beverly Zheng
Dav Pilkey Art Portfolio Award
The works in my portfolio/collection list a range of my personal struggles and obstacles. Key ideas involve the immigrant experience, habits of materialism and overconsumption, depression, loss, stress, bullying, and confusion. Creating these pieces has allowed me to confront and acknowledge these issues. I include bright and bold colors in each piece as a form of self-expression and enjoyment, almost contrasting the subject in a way. In the piece “Winded”, I wanted to push myself out of my comfort zone by experimenting with new techniques and concepts. The initial background was filled with saturated and chaotic colors and shapes. As I am constantly trying to teach myself to “let go” in the process of art (and let loose from highly detailed/rendered pieces), I cover the layer with a flat color. I keep the overlay thin to allow some of the base layer to peek through. I also paint loosely to create texture for visual interest. The presented situation speaks for itself as chaos transpires. There is a car hanging off the wall, a flying dog, a descending airplane, a hole in the wall, an odd speed limit sign, and a “turkey” on the back of a brush. In “Deluge”, the muted background is used to contrast the bright colors in the bathtub and emphasize the abundance of clothing. The nonchalant expression of the arms relates to habituating overconsumption. The foreshortened perspective also dramatizes the sheer amount of clothing in the tub. I used impasto to add small but thick dots for highlights to create depth. I also added dots in the background to improve the stone tile texture. “Forget me not” involved researching various symbols and their meaning. With scumbling, I created an interesting skin texture that added visually appealing tonal variations. The shadows of the cake are relatively low-contrast to reduce any possible competition with the main subject. In the work “Patience”, the dark colors on the edges and my jacket represent the looming gloom of aging. The warm saturated colors present in my skin portray my hopes. Youth is exhibited in the cartoon character, but his sleeping stance foreshadows the inevitable. “Anguish” has a van Gogh-inspired background that takes profound emotions into saturated, swirling lines of articulation. The lines act as a materialization of my vocal eruption. The clothing is high contrast to match the overall composition and dramatic expression. With “The File,” I took a piece of tape and crumpled multiple versions, then I painted my favorite one onto the wall. I glued thick pieces of dried-up paint onto the canvas to add depth and prompt further engagement. The left wall was originally the same value as the middle three, but I decided to increase the darkness. This created symmetry and compositional emphasis towards the center. The giant cucumber and red toilet water are all aspects that are included to establish interest and confusion.
Isa Nava
Cora Bidwell Writing Portfolio Award
This collection of works [in my portfolio] is diverse in substance and writing style but has a thread of connection in that they all stem from my experiences and my communication of the emotions that accompany them. Emotions are abstract things, difficult to name and describe with concrete material like words. Instead, I use my writing to bring the reader into a piece of myself and share with them the raw power emotions can have. After all, what makes people different from one another, but their unique assimilation of moments that belong only to them? To write about the world, any writer may do. But to write about myself, to write from my perspective, is an ability only I have. These emotions are so different from one another that I felt different mediums were necessary to portray them. Poetry conveys the frantic or melodic, memoirs convey the honest and the raw, and fiction portrays in a way more easily understood by a reader who can see themselves in a created character. I offer to the reader myself and my writing because my writing are my emotions, my experiences, and my person in a collection of words on a page.
To My Huelo
Dear Huelo, my abuelo,
Recently I’ve been struggling… to write.
I can pick up a pen, a pencil, or a keyboard and force my fingers into the familiar movements that create
the words I thought were beholden to me.
Dot. Line. Dot. Curve.
I breathe the words to life, watch them dance across the paper, and then suddenly, they stop. I’m forced to watch as they wither away, empty and meaningless marks on a piece of paper left scarred. They’ve been given a death sentence by my trembling hand, the same hand that once held yours.
Dear Huelo,
I held your hand as you brought me to the library and we spent hours buried in the pages of each story. If
you knew I liked a book, you would travel to every library in the city to search for it. Sometimes months
in advance, you would order those books just to see the smile on my face as I eagerly ripped into them.
Back then, we were just a girl her grandfather. That was all we had to be.
Dear Huelo,
I held your hand when you came home from work every day, 6:30 p.m. sharp. There was hardly a day I
didn’t spend at your house, and I memorized when you’d come home to hug you after a long, stressful
day. My hugs were magic, you once told me. They could fix anything. I used to love listening to your
stories, although I’d always tear up when you spoke about the nuns at your old Catholic school that
penalized you for speaking Spanish. I remember that I’d held my little pinkie out and promised to speak
Spanish with you when I learned how. If we had the chance.
Dear Huelo,
I held your hand as you hung the poem I had given you for your seventieth birthday, saying it was the
greatest gift you ever received. Your support gave me confidence, because if the best writer I knew
believed in me, what couldn’t I do? “Huelo… I think I want to be a writer!” I confided in you earnestly,
and was shocked when I received a bout of laughter in return. “Mija, you are a writer,” you said as you
cupped my small hands in yours. “You have Nava blood in your veins, you write as I do. And someday,
you’ll write wonderful stories. I only hope I’ll get to read them.” I wrenched my hands from yours and
threw up a single fist triumphantly, with my other hand resting on my hip. “Of course! Y’know, I think
I’m gonna dedicate my first book to you!” You pulled me softly into your arms and told me how you
couldn’t wait.
Dear Huelo,
I held your hand the second I heard the news that you were sick, racing over to your house next to mine,
forgetting shoes and a coat. I ran down the street through the pouring rain, not caring how soaked my
clothes, my hair, and my socks were. The raindrops raced down my face and competed with the salty
tears to blur my vision until I was stumbling along blind. When I got to your house and saw you sitting
there, I fell into your lap and you held me gently. I was so afraid to let go of my Huelo, my soul. I didn’t
know what death meant but I’d imagined it was jarring and harsh, but quick and painless so the wound
left behind could heal over time. There was nothing quick or painless about your slow-killing sickness. It
was cruel, selfish, and unforgiving. All of the stories lied.
Dear Huelo,
I held your hand as we received first hope from a doctor that there was an experimental treatment in
Atlanta, Georgia you could try, and the whole family stirred up in excitement. For six months, you were
gone, the longest I’d ever gone without seeing you. “Oh, he loved Atlanta,” my Huela, your wife, would
say when I asked. “It was beautiful and full of hope… it was perfect.” You got home, and we spent
another year together. I let myself picture sparkling white weddings where you would be there to support
me and twirl me around in the slightly too-small black suit that you’d had since my father was born. I
thought I’d ask you to tell the story of how you met my Huela, and you would joke about how my partner
had a lot to live up to. I let myself picture you cheering at my basketball games like you always said you
wanted to, and reading the stories I was writing in your honor. Until one day, I received a call that you
were in the hospital, and the clock started ticking again.
I don’t remember when I stopped hoping, imagining, or writing. But I imagine they were around the same
time.
Dear Huelo,
I held your hand as the months went by, and we celebrated each holiday and event with a sense of
finality, knowing that every minute was numbered and every second could be our last. I was trapped in a
living hell, watching you fade before my very eyes, powerless to do anything. Halloween. Thanksgiving.
Christmas. New Year’s. Your birthday. Until… Valentine’s Day. Oh, how ironic that the day to celebrate
the ones you love the most would be the day I lose you. Falling to pieces on the kitchen floor, I reached
out for a hand to guide me and felt my heart crumble away as I realized that no one would ever again
reach back. In every aspect, I was alone. I tore at the ground, raked my fingertips through my hair, and
screamed at the sky praying that God would give you back to me, at least for a minute, to say goodbye.
Huelo,
I held it together as I saw my father cry for the first time seeing your lifeless body lying inside the
beautiful casket he’d chosen for you. It was only a few tears, but I felt useless to him, unable to help as
we said our goodbyes. Praying somehow you would hear us.
I held it together as my friends shared stories about their dead grandfathers who they’d never known as if we were the same. They gave me three days before they began asking me why I was still sad as if I was
wrong to be sad because, of course, you must be a stranger to me. But you were far from a stranger.
But I fell apart as I tried to write for the first time since you’d passed and found that my body was
shaking so bad I could hardly read what I was trying to say. I was stabbing the paper desperately,
searching for a piece of you that I’d missed, hoping to feel your hand holding mine again one more time.
I’ve heard of the five stages of grief. But I don’t believe in them. “Stages,” implies that grief goes away
with time, or that there’s a correct way to grieve. No matter how hard I searched, there was no magical
form of grieving that could teach me to be happy again. No cure-all plan. I’d begun to wish that your
sickness had taken me instead, for I felt sick in my own right at the carnage. There are no five stages of
grief, there are only those who die and those who get left behind. Are we who get left behind really the
lucky ones?
I didn’t feel lucky as I spent months on months smiling without my eyes and laughing without humor. To
the outside world, I got over it in weeks.
But I still saw you every time I closed my eyes.
I’d lost my ability to be happy without you, I’d drowned in my grief. Little by little I had to learn how to
breathe underwater and appreciate what you gave me.
My writing.
So every painful pencil stroke was a reminder of the suffering I’d gone through, and the love for you that
made it so hard.
I started small, with a simple heartfelt letter, and tried to learn what it meant to live and love in a world
without you the best way I knew how. I wrote.
Dear Huelo,
Recently I’ve been struggling.
But I think I’ll be okay.
To see more Gold Medal Portfolio recipients, past and present, visit our Eyes on the Prize series.