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 2024 Gold Medal Portfolio recipients. Next up are Jada McAliley and Diemmy Dang.

Jada McAliley

Blick Art Materials Art Portfolio Award

My portfolio aims to express close familial relationships through portraiture and self-portraiture. It depicts the complexities of relationships within my family and relationship to self. Each piece delves into intimate moments, deep emotions, and interactions I share with family members. Simultaneously, it explores my psyche and personal moments with myself. The homey environments serve as pathways into a sense of vulnerability in each piece. In relation to myself as an artist, these pieces forced me to break out of my traditional art making processes and experiment more. As I did these pieces, I started to work with repetition, collage, and movement.

Diemmy Dang

Command Companies Writing Portfolio Award

Ode to the Suburban Temple

I don’t think that this temple belongs here.
sitting in suburbia like a sore thumb,
stuck among a plain of unassuming buildings,
it looks too loud, too boastful, too ostentatious

walls of fire-engine red and mustard-yellow
smothering themselves in coats of fake metallic gold
as if straining against the concrete-gilded/pavement-lacquered/strip-mall-decorated
land of graying American dreams that this temple floats amongst

a grocery store sits around the corner,
by the gas station and the liquor store and the fast food place down the street
all linoleum-lined, washed in fluorescent light

but here in this temple, the floor is carpeted
nudged by crouched knees in prayer
by the swish of a monk’s persimmon-colored robes,
silent and silencing all at once

and once again, I am hushed
wondering again, how all these people have come to gather
in this multi-colored, gold-plated, pagoda-roofed temple,
wedged between the cracks of small-town monotony

it’s a miraculous thing,
this temple, and all these people who have come to appreciate it—

the immigrants who come here, unassimilated
choking on English, cradling stubborn words
between the crooks of crooked teeth;

the ruddy-faced boy, who grips an i-Pad in his Cheeto-dusted fingers;
the shriveled woman, who carries war in her bones and Agent Orange in her blood;
the absent father; the confused mother; the business owner; the factory employee;
the Americanized child, searching for roots; the foreigner, yearning to put down roots

all of them, searching for home in this temple’s little island of familiarity

what is home, but a place to rest your feet at night?
my dad asks, and I answer
that home must be more

and suddenly I think that this temple is more
more than religion, more than the incense that breathes within its walls
more than the golden Buddha statues that glint in the light

it is people, linked by language or weathered by war
tired or radiant or lost or angry or alone
or all of the above

because above all, this temple is a place
where people hungering for home
come hoping to find it.

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