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.
Abbey Dickey
Jill and Peter Kraus Art Portfolio Award
Birmingham, AL
My collection of work seeks to explain the unexplained. My work revolves around repetition through thoughts, actions, and rules. Rituals and superstitions are born from specific fears and comforts, yet they manifest in unique and strange ways. I want to create work that explores the imagery that surrounds my life by giving a physical body to display itself in for others to view and connect with. It’s easy to feel isolated in your own repetition and superstitions, especially as a person with obsessive compulsive disorder, therefore my goal as an artist is to create work that can open up these ideas to explore what makes these images important to me. In my work, I use many different printing techniques such as cyanotype printing and toning, SolarFast sun printing, and CitraSolv pressed printing. These processes make the most sense in creating work about repetitive actions because the act of creating multiple cyanotypes, SolarFast prints, or CitraSolv prints is repetitive in itself: mix chemicals, paint paper/fabric, place your negatives, expose or press, (tone), repeat. The idea of these creating fame-by-frame films alludes to the concept of repetition, cycles, and ongoing processes. In addition to this, my sculptural work explores repetition of tedious stitched images. My Breakfast with Sally is made from hundreds of the same found images. The entire piece is machine-sewn, then hand-sewn to the wooden skeleton or to create details. Each stitch is a repetitive mark, making this process a long and consuming one, connecting the process to the final outcome and significance.
Tape 1
Callum Chen
Marci Klein Writing Portfolio Award
New York, NY
Hair, at its core, is a form of gender expression for me. My Taiwanese mother insisted upon its length signifying prosperity and femininity; I buzzed it a few years ago when I began grappling with my identity as trans; recently, I’ve been carving it into a soft mullet, representing the liminal space I’ve discovered as I’ve become more secure in my masculinity. My collection’s title introduces the multiplicity of hair and gender, incorporating the traditional superstition that underscores my relationship with my mother (as wet hair is seen as a bad omen). It largely explores the distance—amplified by my closeted transness—between my self-perception and the way my mother views me. I enjoyed altering form to reflect the poem’s contents, paralleling my self-modification that reflects my developing identities. In both “Seashell Resonance” and “Cephalophore,” I disrupt an otherwise-consistent pattern of lines in stanzas to imbue the respective works with a lingering discomfort and isolation—which permeate my relationship with my mother, as well. It’s impossible to reconcile how I look more as my mother as I grow older with my gender dysphoria and desire for stereotypical maleness with false expectations of daughterhood, and so on.
As I grow distant from my mother, as she is unable to perceive me as “no longer her daughter,” I grow distant from my heritage. I take tradition—the strict sonnet form of 14 lines—and manipulate it to reflect the chaos of my kitchen and the various perceptions of me. In “Ghazal,” I also strayed from the traditional form, employing slant rhyme in the qaafiya and homophone in the radeef, highlighting the multitudes within my relationship with my mother: heartache, false expectations, resentment, and an underlying and futile desire for connection on both ends.
Seashell Resonance (after Mary Jo Bang)
Your carcass, limp in the yellowed jaws of Summer, turns,
listless, wistful. You keep finding yourself near water, in
water, all day, you sit with that and with water in a glass,
wearing boots and a bikini on the beach, looking to tan and to
shake the sand from your soul, watching kids chasing the tide,
not playing mermaids, just asking how deep can I go before
my feet miss the shore. Every Summer feels like you’re drowning,
filling your lungs with smoke, hoping you’ll float, or—at
least—fall in a way that is gentle. If horseshoes are good luck,
what are horseshoe crabs, you wonder, watching one bury itself
deeper, deeper. Your mother’s at home, shrunk deep in an armchair,
singing, maybe, craving shellfish and a sense of self. She calls you
on a conch and the connection is faulty, static too strong,
you hear your own voice echoed back to you, more static,
sea sounds in your other ear.
To see more Gold Medal Portfolio recipients, past and present, visit our Eyes on the Prize series.