Johns Creek High School graduate Joyce Kim and her mixed-media sculpture ‘Out of Control’ at a local art exhibition. (Courtesy of Joyce Kim)
Joyce Kim was on a Zoom call with her teacher, her mom, and the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards team when she found out she’d won. After the call ended, she and her mother screamed.
The Alpharetta teenager had just become one of 16 students nationwide — and the only one from Georgia — to receive a Gold Medal Portfolio Award, the organization’s highest honor. The award comes with a $12,500 scholarship. On June 10th, Kim will be recognized at Carnegie Hall in New York City. In the fall, she heads to Yale University.
It wasn’t something she had let herself expect. Before applying to the program, Kim browsed the Scholastic alumni gallery online, a list that includes filmmaker Ken Burns, artist Andy Warhol, writer Joyce Carol Oates, and poet Amanda Gorman.
“I was scrolling through the gallery, and I was like, ‘Wow, these people are so talented. I wish I was part of them,’” Kim said.
From imitation to mixed media
Kim started formal art instruction in seventh grade at Won Art Studio in Suwanee, with acrylic basics, proportion exercises, and learning to replicate a reference accurately. It was foundational and deliberate.
Range came later. Through AP Studio Art courses at Johns Creek High School, she moved from single-medium work to mixed media, combining painting with sculpture and adding pop-up elements and three-dimensional structures to flat surfaces. By senior year, she was also making murals.
“Throughout high school, I did mixed media, like incorporating 2D with 3D elements, like pop-up design and murals, too,” Kim said. “I could explore various mediums here.”
A selection of works from Joyce Kim’s Gold Medal Portfolio, ‘Fear of the Unknown and the Uncontrollable Forces,’ on display. The large purple elephant painting at center right is ‘Do Not Think of the Pink Elephant.’ (Courtesy of Joyce Kim)
Combining materials, she says, is never decorative. It’s structural. Each added element carries meaning that the single medium couldn’t hold on its own.
‘Fear of the unknown and the uncontrollable forces’
Kim’s Gold Medal portfolio, ‘Fear of the Unknown and the Uncontrollable Force‘ takes its name from a set of emotions Kim says she has navigated her entire life: fear, control, perfectionism, self-doubt, and acceptance. She immigrated from Korea to Georgia in 2016, in the third grade, and arrived without English. Her portfolio is, in part, a reckoning with what that experience left behind.
Art, she said, was the space where she could finally sit with those feelings rather than avoid them.
One piece in the portfolio draws directly from psychology. ‘Do Not Think of the Pink Elephant’ is built around the ironic process theory, the clinical finding that attempting to suppress a thought makes it more persistent. For Kim, the paradox wasn’t abstract.
“Whenever I thought about my fear, or my anxious thoughts, or the self-doubt … I kept on trying to suppress it,” Kim explained. “And then it was like popping up in my head more after I tried to suppress it.”
What’s next
At Yale, Kim plans to study psychology and visual arts. She also wants to expand into areas her portfolio hasn’t yet reached: collaborative projects, digital art, and interdisciplinary design.
To other young artists, she offers advice drawn from her own early years of making work she thought others wanted to see.
“Creating works that genuinely you feel connected to and that you genuinely care about will kind of get you far,” Kim said. “Making work that really matters to you is more important than trying to create something perfect.”
