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.
For the next few weeks, we’ll be profiling the 2023 Gold Medal Portfolio recipients. Next up are Shnayjaah Jeanty and Joanne Hong.
Shnayjaah Jeanty
My portfolio was inspired by my former Poetry Club president, who said that Black art was “redundant.” To her, the black experience had become a broken record—an earworm of sob stories over events only read about in history books. With this collection of poems, I wanted to highlight multiple nuances of the modern Black struggle, all with inventive extended metaphors and messages.
An Intervention for the Metaphor
POETRY
Shnayjaah Jeanty, Grade 12, Charles W. Flanagan High School, Pembroke Pines, FL. Kristy Modia, Educator. Young at Art Museum, Affiliate. Gold Medal Portfolio Award, The Harry and Betty Quadracci Writing Portfolio Award
dear metaphor,
you’re the reason that an issue’s validity
depends on my ability
to equate one thing to something else
why this poem has to break
itself into trophy
for it to be “powerful”
why slavery can’t just be slavery
why it has to be the white man’s gold star instead
or every african-american’s ugly birthmark
or mass incarceration
dear metaphor,
i tell the audience that the system’s race card never declines
when spending $80 billion on prison cost
and they sit in their seats and snap
prison sentences aren’t a metaphor
but i have to compare a white man’s and a black man’s
for them to get angry
for them to see that we are innocent until proven black
dear metaphor,
we were shipped to a country
where handcuffs are a more practical baby shower gift than socks
while other high schoolers study for the SAT
we practice traffic stop etiquette
our skin is probable cause
and they snap
because the black experience is nothing
if it’s not in rhyme scheme
if it doesn’t hip-hop and slam poetic
dear metaphor,
the imagery of a black boy’s bloodshot white tee and blue uniforms
just looks like the U.S. flag
so i have to hold a black child next to an orange jumpsuit
for them to put our justice system on trial
but the income gap doesn’t allow black defendants to plead anything
but poverty
and they snap
incarceration is the exception to the 13th amendment
oppression’s favorite great-grandchild
the government could only consume 3/5 of us
so the bill of rights lapped up the leftovers
a transatlantic transaction
where our freedom always ends up being a figure of speech
dear metaphor,
you’re the reason that i was told the rough draft of this poem was “too literal”
why my generational pain has to be edited
exactly why being black
and being caged
aren’t merely similar experiences
but one and the same
Joanne Hong
When I take inventory of the state of the world, of our progress, of myself—I see disorder. I see uncertainty. We are, as individuals and as a collective society, burdened by our pasts, our traumas, by the skeletons in our closets. Yet, so many of us sleepwalk through the most confronting and challenging moments in life. I wanted to wake up. I faced where I at first chose silence, where I at first chose ignorance. I dug into those pieces of myself, however uncomfortable, and put what I found out on display.
If I had to distill it down, my portfolio primarily explores the two major roadblocks I’ve had to confront and challenge in life—my racial and my gender identity. In the Black-White racial hierarchy of American feminism, Asian women have become an overlooked ‘middle-ground’, only worsening with stereotypes depicting us as well-behaved, inferior, and submissive. As an Asian woman, it’s been difficult to carve out my identity amongst a group—my fellow women—intent on raising me up, yet lacking in the historical and cultural context necessary to do so. Everywhere I looked I seemed to be fed the same narrative of Asian women: silenced and hypersexualized. Compounded with the recent overturning of Roe V. Wade and the stigmatization of sex education in Asian culture, I found myself more lost in my womanhood and culture than ever . . . Growing up, I changed how I looked and acted so that people could recognize me as an individual so that my teachers didn’t confuse me with the two other Korean girls in my class. My continuous alterations of my personality and identity left me confused about who I really was. But I found that this was the beginning of a long journey to self-actualization. Textile art provides me with a medium to express this concept. I love working with yarn because it is malleable in nature; knitted works can always be unraveled to create new ones, much like the flexibility of the human psyche and our capability of change . . . While my art helps me escape my comfort zone and recontextualizes my identity in an ever suppressive world, I hope my art also provides others the stepping stones to their own confrontations.
Featured image: Joanne Hong, Which Is It?, Expanded Projects. Grade 12, North Hollywood High School Highly Gifted Magnet, North Hollywood, CA. Inyoung Seoung (Drawing Factory), Educator; Region-at-Large, Affiliate. Gold Medal Portfolio, The Harry and Betty Quadracci Art Portfolio
To see more Gold Medal Portfolio recipients, past and present, visit our Eyes on the Prize series.