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.
Joyce Kim
BLICK Art Materials Portfolio Award
Suwanee, GA
Immigrating to America from Korea in 2016, I encountered many unknowns early on: the foreign culture, language, and environment. What began as discomfort with shifting routines or weather slowly grew into a fear of uncertainty. Adapting to a new country meant involuntarily accepting changes. These experiences made me a person who obsessively tries to control every aspect in life, often leaving me more tired and fearful.
My art explores this obsession, fear, sensitivity, perfectionism, self-doubt, and acceptance. Through paintings, drawings, mixed media, and sculptures, I explore the fear of the unknown and the uncontrollable forces in order to express my emotions, overcome internal conflicts, and evoke resonance. Because I examine personal emotions, I get inspired by my thoughts and small habits, which I analyze on a daily basis. I also incorporate Korean proverbs that I grew up hearing and psychological concepts to my pieces like the pink elephant paradox and intrinsic/extrinsic motivations.
View works from Fear of the Uncontrollable, Joyce’s award-winning portfolio, via our online gallery.
Ananya Kharat
Maurice R. Robinson Fund Portfolio Award
Downers Grove, IL
Throughout my work, the readers can understand a few standout ideas: the deep longing that comes with adolescence, the trials one must go through to process those emotions, and, most significantly, the impact of a 2000s-2010s Midwest America upon those revelations. These are all markers of my own life; the portfolio is essentially a diary.
Ultimately, this portfolio is a representation of my journey into self-realization and what it means to love yourself, even if the setting you live in actively works against that. While the pieces in the collection are personal and anecdotal, I hope some Midwestern teenager out there is able to read this and realize they’re not alone in feeling different; that they don’t have to watch the world end, too.
View works from It’s Killing Me, Illinois, Ananya’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: Joyce Kim, Surrender, Mixed Media. Grade 12, Won Art Studio, Suwanee, GA. Won Park, Educator; Savannah College of Art and Design, Affiliate. Gold Medal Portfolio, BLICK Art Materials Portfolio Award