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.

Lena Harnik
Maurice R. Robinson Fund Art Portfolio Award
Hamilton, NY

When I started brainstorming last fall I didn’t know what I wanted this portfolio to say, I just knew that I wanted to paint cowboys. As a character, a lifestyle, and an identity, the cowboy fascinates me. I thought about all the different ways there are to be a cowboy. I wanted my portfolio to acknowledge the differences between the cowboys you see in movies and advertisements, and the real people living that lifestyle, both now and historically. This portfolio isn’t very stylistically cohesive, because cowboys aren’t all similar. There are many different expressions and varieties of cowboys, and sometimes they contradict each other. I wanted that to be reflected in the works. I split the cowboys into three categories:

• The Classic Cowboy: The quintessential American man of films and posters. He’s heroic and rugged and definitely a cisgender white man.
• The Working Man: This is for all the people who make their livelihood working on ranches and farms. This identity is their work, lifestyle, and community.
• The Rodeo Queen: There’s a large part of cowboy culture that’s about drama and flair. Sparkly clothes and big shows and a level of frivolity that’s traditionally feminine.

My identity is influenced by all of these categories. I buy into all the escapist dreams of the Wild West and spend hours looking at ranches in Montana. I’m learning farming skills that I’ll need for my future homestead plans in adulthood. I love nothing more than getting too dressed up in sparkly clothes and dancing with my friends. I’m a cowboy even though I live on the east coast, I’ve never cantered on a horse, and I don’t know how to throw the lasso I got for Christmas last year. I’m a cowboy because I always hold my chin up and I don’t let other people tell me what to think and who to be. I’m a cowboy because I have big dreams. Big dreams like this portfolio. It was my cowboy identity that gave me the determination to finish this thing and present it to the world.

Cowboys

Tanya Rastogi
The New York Times Writing Portfolio Award
Riverdale, IA

My house is flowing with dormant stories. Our closets hide stacks of unfamiliar photo albums and bundles of wrapped sandalwood figurines. There are dusty books on our shelves with scribbles on every page, intricate silverware older than my great-grandparents in our highest cupboard. Yet not every story is tangible. On quiet evenings, my mother’s hands craft meals without measurement, her movements instinctual. In the home office, my father hums old songs beneath the drone of our fan. Years ago, when I believed no one was watching, I would search for these stories. I’d pore over old photos and relics, attempt to recreate weekly dinners, and sing along in gibberish to the tunes I memorized over months. It wasn’t until I began channeling these fragments into writing that I understood how our home came to be. My parents were born a mere three decades after India’s Partition. My father spent his time throwing rocks out of his school window for fun, while my mother was told she couldn’t study biology to fulfill her medical school dreams. These restrictions have manifested into both love and pain—and in my journey to understand them, I’ve developed a desire to make their stories heard and transform others’ perceptions of my culture and the trauma circulating through its people. ‘Where the Birds Went’ is a snapshot of summer girlhood and melting barriers. Though we physically exist in the same home, my mother and I are separated by several decades and thousands of miles, a difference that has taken years to bridge—and we may never reach permanence. I’ve learned to unearth stories within myself and those closest to me. Generational trauma, the precursor to many of my life’s circumstances, can be dismantled through catharsis and empathy. I cannot turn back time, but I can make others feel its effects—the slow entropy of my culture, the fading love, the good sewn within years of anger. I can create new stories, beautiful ones, for every future child wandering through their home.

Where the Birds Went

Beneath July sun, a voice unravels
into kitchen smoke, golden oil coating
our crooked girl teeth. Here, you ask me
where the birds went, and I answer—
where it’s clean, which is to say: where we
are still dew-fresh and petaled. Today  
we search for our reflection in the 
shit-green puddle beside the sewer 
drain. You open your mouth and contort 
your lips like a fish. I open my mouth 
and surrender to vanity, skin peeling 
in soft scales. A face replicated to split
tenderly under rough tongue—and maybe
this mouth hung loose long before the final
bleed, hemoglobin eddying in smooth blue
light. Home videos replacing heartbeat.
Repetition as a plea for return. On the
pavement, we birth slick brown cheeks and 
a want greater than thirst. Ma does not 
know this body is not ours, lungs
overfilled with prayers for American 
excellence, curls disentangled to ribboned
polyester: Participant of. Runner-up. First
place! The UV index is 9 and the air absorbs
our breath and we wish we were inside, 
burnt fingers splayed in sacrifice atop 
the cutting board, onions coaxing shame
from our hungering eyes. After we decided
sinlessness was too heavy to inherit, Ma 
sank through the orange-moon slits of light
that paint the living room at 2:00 a.m., silvered
silently to the glint of unwashed dishes and 
our melted reflection begging for materiality.
It’s only noon and we’re starting to feel a little 
faint, a little weightless. Unborn, rosy-pink, and
maybe it’s time we unlearn how flowers
unfurl—soft, to the sky, loved, and then—
digested between the jaws of a thousand flies. 

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