Jessica Gardner Earns Gold Medal For Art

Press Release:

Jessica Gardner, a junior Advanced Placement (A.P.) Art student at has received a prestigious 2012 National Scholastic Art and Writing Awards Gold Medal for her untitled painting.

The Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, run by the nonprofit Alliance for Young Artists and Writers, is the oldest and most prestigious national program offering early recognition and scholarships to creative teenagers. To advance to the nationals, a student must be named a regional Gold Key or Silver Key winner or Gold Key and American Visions nominee. This year’s competition attracted 200,000 submissions in 28 categories of art and writing. 

“I was surprised by how big a deal this gold medal is,” said Gardner, whose painting, along with the works of other medalists, will be exhibited at Parsons, The New School of Design in New York City.

Gardner’s painting, “Untitled,” is of a Victorian-era chair, stark in its simplicity and yet highly detailed. An A.P. Art student, Gardner chose to study the “household architecture” of chairs as her portfolio concentration. She created a series of 12 paintings of different types of chairs, using the chair “as a vehicle to express humanity in aloneness, not loneliness.” Gardner came to A.P. art without the traditional prerequisite work. “She obviously had talent, but she had a lot of catching up to do,” commented Ellen Slatkin, one of La Salle’s A.P. art teachers. “She is working in metaphors - formal chairs, casual chairs. It’s part of who she is.”

Gardner did not consider herself an artist until just two years ago when she brought her own emotions to her work and began to work for herself and not to please her peers.

Her choice of subject matter is a natural outgrowth, and she intends to pursue an art/architecture major in college.