A Gold Medal Portfolio Award is the highest honor teens 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.

Jack Adams
Jill and Peter Kraus Portfolio Award
Birmingham, AL

The work [in my portfolio] is on a long search for where mankind is today; relating itself to apes, hominids, and early communication through symbols acting as reminders of the past and guides of what lies imminently and distantly in the future. It details the feeling of some force being amidst that drives human progression, confusing what nature drove man to evolve to and what man as nature and consciousness chose to become. It is easy to feel a sense of disorientation with what the role of humanity is when the evidence of all religion and philosophy seem to start with a human origin. Pool Party/ How to Build a Home utilizes early hominids to question and observe human origins, conscience, and freedom, taking place in a backyard as a staple of an environment cured for modern humans. Oil paint allows me to create a playful, changing process of the pieces. I have a direct confrontation with color and drawing. Through sharp, physical brushwork, I describe environments that give life to everything from grass to above ground pools, creating a world where anything is possible.

Still, symbols like pickle jars and birthday presents quietly anchor narratives about displacement and group behavior. In Shadow of Neighborhood Field, a man faces a neighborhood blaring with bright, artificial colors. A pickle jar rests in a pantry to his lower right, implying his man-made environment may cure and flavor his character. The abstracted environments reflect feelings of isolation, discussions of religion, and the knowledge that there are millions of years of history contributing to them. Through this process, my work fuses a concrete truth of history and a current state of human capability. Uncovering where a human fits as a constructed force, driving innovation, and a subject of biology. It witnesses the feelings of cognition preceding both ingenuity, language, and organic life. Observing not only to discuss what the role of a person today is, but to share the connection humans have through instincts formed on the same planet.

View works from The New Cave Culture, Jack’s award-winning portfolio, via our online gallery.

Niamh Carmichael
Merson Family Portfolio Award
North Charleston, SC

The works in my portfolio all deal with the theme of family, familial loss, and how to navigate that after the fact. For the poetry, it’s a grief derived from my own life, while the prose works explore loss of varied experiences. The collection as a whole is about operating in a world that you may no longer recognize after someone integral to yourself and your way of being is absent, whether this loss is death or simply a lack of presence.

This was not, at first, an intentional theme, but rather one that has cropped up consistently in my work over the years—so much so that I have needed to fully embrace it, because even if I’m not writing about family and familial loss, it shows up anyhow. This may be through the unexplained absence of a parent, or a background conflict throughout a story; no matter how small, family is something that has always been a part of my writing and always will be.

For the poetry of this collection, I’ve examined my father’s loss alongside and through something seemingly separate—religion or bird-watching—although these are both topics in which he has influenced me greatly, and which after his death my feelings toward have significantly shifted.

Whether in an intricately personal voice or an intentionally detached one, the prose works explore more varied experiences with grief and family, deviating from my own direct experiences and increasing the scope of what it means to lose and have lost.

Read works from Cardinals in the Tree My Father Planted Before Passing, Niamh’s award-winning portfolio, via our online gallery.

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

Featured image: Jack Adams, Poking Party, Painting. Grade 12, Alabama School of Fine Arts, Birmingham, AL. Randy Gachet, Educator; Region-at-Large, Affiliate. Gold Medal Portfolio, Jill and Peter Kraus Portfolio Award