More than 335,000 works of art and literature were submitted to the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards this year, but fewer than half of 1% of those received the prestigious National Gold Medal — and two of those works were created by teenagers in the Valley.
Marit Gubrium, a senior at Amherst-Pelham Regional High School, won a National Gold Medal for “Lily,” a painting of a classmate playfully biting into flowers. Mina Mao, a sophomore at the Williston Northampton School, won a National Gold Medal for her essay “From Rousseau to Hitler, from Locke to Roosevelt: The Ripple of Philosophy in History.”
“It’s very exciting,” Gubrium said. “Honestly, I wasn’t really expecting it at all, because it’s one of those long-shot things that you submit for and it’s like, ‘Okay, I’m probably not gonna win anything,’ but you made the work, you’ve done it, and you’re proud of yourself for it. However, I’m very, very excited to have won a National Gold Medal.”
“I was actually really shocked, because I didn’t know its actual significance, but all of my teachers, my friends, were congratulating me, and I think it’s a happy thing,” Mao said.
The awards, which were founded in 1923, recognize talented American and Canadian artists and writers in grades 7 through 12. As Scholastic Awards honorees, Gubrium and Mao join the ranks of Truman Capote, Ken Burns, Sylvia Plath, Andy Warhol, Stephen King, Lena Dunham, Zac Posen and Richard Linklater.
Gubrium and Mao are two of the 158 students in Massachusetts to be recognized in the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards this year and two of 69 to receive National Gold Medals.
Aaron Han from Deerfield Academy also won a Gold Medal in Painting for the work “Glass Pond,” and Chenyu Wu from The Bement School in Deerfield won a Gold Medal in Drawing for the work “Skeletal Symphony.”
Gubrium created the painting in Ben Sears’s color studies class last semester. The image came from a photo she’d taken of a friend in a previous LGBTQ literature class and later used for an “optical mixture” assignment, which involves layering dots of different colors on top of each other. It was her first time using gouache in her work rather than pen and ink.
“When we were looking through pictures for the assignment, I really wanted to find something that was very, very vibrant in its colors, because the whole point of doing the optical mixture is so that you can get those vibrancies in color that you wouldn’t necessarily be able to get otherwise,” she said.
“Mar is a tremendous artist and always has been. Her drawing abilities, her natural ability to capture proportion, to understand light and shadow, have always been really, really impressive,” Sears said. “But I also really appreciate the emotion that she puts into her work.”
“She’s really a well-rounded artist and she has the technical ability, but also, her ideas are really strong, and that’s a really rare thing to have in high school,” he added.
Mao, a longtime fan of philosophy and history, got the idea to write her essay from a prompt as part of the John Locke Institute’s Global Essay Competition last year. When she heard about the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, she decided to give it a shot since the entry fee was only $10. She submitted a few other entries as well, including a creative writing piece about a bookstore; an essay about the impact of climate change on the sea near her hometown of Shenzhen, China; and an essay about the history of reproductive rights in the U.S.
Mao credits her love of philosophy and history to her parents and to growing up in a house full of books about philosophers. As a kid, she loved reading about Chinese history; this year, at the Williston Northampton School, she loved learning more about it through her AP World History class.
Gubrium, Mao and Sears will be recognized at an awards ceremony at Carnegie Hall in New York City on Wednesday, June 10. Mao was unfamiliar with the venue before she found out about the ceremony, but she was impressed when she Googled it.
“It was so grand, so magnificent,” Mao said.
“I’ve been to New York City maybe twice in my entire life, so just visiting the city, I’m very, very excited for,” Gubrium said. “I’m also really excited to see other people’s work. I want to know, the other people that got medals, what does their work look like? And I’m excited to meet all of these people as well. I love meeting fellow artists — it’s a lot of fun — and asking, ‘What’s their inspiration? What is their outlook on creation, and what place do they come from when they create?’”
Gubrium began making art when she was much younger, and she’s always had a fondness for portraits. She grew up drawing in a cartoonish style, but around eighth grade, she pivoted to creating more realistic work. Her inspirations include Mexican painter Frida Kahlo; Syrian-American illustrator and animator Rama Duwaji, who is also the First Lady of New York City; and Palestinian painter and sculptor Sliman Mansour.
During the Gazette’s visit to Sears’ classroom, Gubrium also showed another piece she’d created in another class, an image of a woman throwing a rock at an out-of-frame Israeli tank. In gold leaf are Arabic words from a poem by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, which translate to, ”On this land, we have that which makes life worth living.”
She created the piece at her grandfather’s house. “There are still bits of gold leaf all over my jiddo’s [grandfather’s] kitchen floor. I swear to God, that stuff is like glitter — it breeds and it gets everywhere,” she laughed. “But it looks so pretty, so it is worth it.”
Mao is a sophomore, so her college plans aren’t yet set, but she’s thinking about majoring in chemistry and environmental science with a minor in history or English for a career that could involve both writing and science.
Gubrium, who is of Lebanese descent, originally planned to attend the American University of Beirut. However, due to the ongoing war in the Middle East, she said that path is becoming far less likely. Instead, she will likely attend the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she plans to major in anthropology with a minor (or two) in the arts. After that, she intends to transition her academic success into a lifelong creative career.
“I would love to be an artist and be successful at that, being able to sell work and do art as a living,” she said. “It’s kind of unrealistic, but I would love to be able to do that, and I feel like I have the motivation to do that, which, I feel like, is a good pointer in that direction.”
For more information about the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, visit artandwriting.org.
