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.

Sea Sombar
Pittsburgh, PA
The Dorothea Tanning Portfolio Award

Delving into transgender themes has been highly rewarding. Through artistic exploration and experimentation, certain truths about the reality of trans life in this country is deconstructed. Not everything is so obvious and out in the open. Most of the time, one must dig deep in the weeds of misinformation to find the truth. Trans youth especially are hardly ever represented, so I tried to explore that within my work. When looking at these pieces I hope the audience can spot the difference in lenses between different pieces. For example, NAIL POLISH is made specifically for trans youth—it may not be fully understood by other audiences, but that is intended. Whereas other pieces represent journalistic intent intended for a non-trans audience. Both are equally important, but in their own ways.

View works from Transcription, Sea’s award-winning portfolio, via our online gallery.

Kurn Sundaram
San Jose, CA
Command Companies Portfolio Award

These pieces began as failed attempts to map this body. My first spine could not hold the weight of what the body had to remember. So I built another one: not upward like a ladder, but outward, crooked, myth-thick. A second spine that understood fracture was its geometry. A new cosmos, small enough to fit inside the throat but large enough to keep me standing.

These pieces are artifacts of that construction.. . . I didn’t curate these pieces for thematic unity as much as to demonstrate the topology of my internal weather systems: faults, pressures, the occasional small god pacing in the rafters. Myth appears when reality alone is too literal, when deities become utilities, when prayer turns to survival. In ‘RAKSHASA’, I undergo metamorphosis, finding what it truly means for me to shed my old spine. A teething of the body.

This portfolio is not meant to end with my healing, because I am still not fully healed. But sharing my story has started to scab my wounds. This is reclaiming my narrative and renewing into a new self, one unafraid to talk about what happened to me. Speaking truth into the universe with open arms for other survivors, this is the Cosmology of my Second Spines.

View RAKSHASA from Cosmology of My Second Spines, Kurn’s award-winning portfolio, via our digital publications.

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

Featured image: Sea Sombar, Still from Nex Benedict, Film & Animation. Home School, Pittsburgh, PA. Educator unavailable; The Seneca Valley School District, Affiliate. Gold Medal Portfolio, The Dorothea Tanning Portfolio Award