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.

Zoey Kim
Kensington, MD
GV Group Portfolio Award

The first question that guided my investigation was: Do I want to become what I despised most?

Throughout my investigation, I delved into my unexplainable embarrassment of my culture. Why did my mother’s thick accent repulse me? Why was I so reluctant to show my attachment to my culture?

When my grandmother passed away as I was creating this portfolio, my father left to live in Korea and booked a flight for my mother and me to Korea a year later. My focus shifted. I began to ask: What could I do in preparation for becoming an immigrant myself? How could I embrace what I despised most?

Initially, I began with flat acrylic paintings on canvas to depict fragments of my culture. I then entirely deviated from these methods. I wanted to add tangibility to these fragments and embrace the audience with my memories through the fragrance of my grandpa’s pine garden tacked straight onto the wood painting. I experimented with entirely new mediums, pliant swathes of fabric and mixed media that were malleable and free, similar to the ductility of my own identity.

View works from Acceptance, Zoey’s award-winning portfolio, via our online gallery.

Isabella Lyons
Chesterfield, VA
Dav Pilkey Portfolio Award

I begin my portfolio with my genesis, my birth. “Realms” is a piece about parallel universes, about the potential for me to have been born from my father’s Korean ex-wife instead of my Filipino mother. I explore this potential with stanzas that alternate between me and my hypothetical half-Korean self. The poem establishes my portfolio’s central theme and tone of tension, being caught between cultures, languages, identities, and potentials. Each piece in the portfolio in some way reflects my genesis, as I am born, renewed, severed, molded, and changed throughout the collection. I like the idea that creation, thus birth, is never straightforward, and yet we become something new every day.

“Decomposition” begins with my father dissecting my pet fish on the kitchen table. It is an essay on inheriting addiction, on becoming the figurative fish thrashing on the living room floor from a substance withdrawal seizure. I continue to explore my potential self by combining my family’s past and my childhood observations. With this essay I aim to establish a theme of generational curses related to the paternal side of my family.

“Crucifix Reincarnated” further traverses through my family’s past. In this piece, my father invites me to continue the family’s addiction while he is crucified on a cornstalk. I feel as though I am cursed to inherit addiction from my father and that this curse is somehow inherently linked to our southern, religious upbringing. I borrow Bible verses, motifs of crucifixion, and references to Nehemiah, a Biblical figure who served as a poison taster, to evolve the thematic link between my father and God the Father.

“self-portrait of a queer as manananggal/The Manananggal Called Esau” merges my conflicting queer identity with my Christian religious upbringing and being Filipina. Manananggals are aswangs (ghosts/monsters) in Filipino folklore who split their bodies in half at night and fly around to steal children and suck blood from them, like a mosquito. Being queer and closeted in my household sometimes makes me feel like a monster, like I have to split away from half of my identity to be with my family. In this poem, I imagine what it would be like to be a manananggal, and to visit my mother in the dark when she cannot see what a monster I am as her queer kid.

I pursue the theme of conflicting identity in “Heirloom,” as I ask my lover’s dead mother at her grave if I can have her blessing to love her child. I tell her mother how I am conflicted in asking for this blessing, in wanting this love, when I feel like it uproots my culture.

“A Survivor’s Guide to the East Coast” concludes my portfolio. I wanted this collection to begin with my birth and land with the severing of the umbilical cord. This essay follows me as I grow up along the east coast, followed by my biracial identity, poverty, and puberty.

View works from Genesis, Isabella’s award-winning portfolio, via our online gallery.

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

Featured image: Zoey Kim, Halabuhji, Mixed Media. Grade 12, Albert Einstein High School, Kensington, MD. Sarah Harnish, Educator; Region-at-Large, Affiliate. Gold Medal Portfolio, GV Group Portfolio Award