SCMA Congratulates Tryon Prize Winners Lola Anaya '24 and Yasmine Porath '24

Every year, the Smith College Museum of Art awards the Tryon Prize in Art and Writing. These prizes recognize the work of current Smith College students in installation, performance, video, sound, digital, internet and interactive art or writing related to a work at the museum.

This year, the first place Tyron Prize for Art went to Yasmine Porath '24 for Embryosmic, an interactive installation that, in the artist’s words, explores “themes of the body through portals involving a mix of organic materials such as SCOBY, bioplastic, blood, walnut shells, and hair, as well as recycled textiles, takeout containers, and tea bag wrappers joined together by light.” Check out a video of the piece here. 

Second place: Amiel Williams '24

Honorable mentions: Aubrey Banie '27 and Gabrielle Coello '24

The Tryon Prize for Writing went to Lola Anaya '24 for their poems in response to Edwin Romanzo Elmer's Mourning Picture, which is currently on view on the third floor. You can read Lola’s poems below.

Second place: Ciana Socias '25

Honorable mention: Margaret (M.J.) Schwartz '24

Containment

I found myself stuck with the bugs between the blades of grass

A mite dares to climb up, not knowing there is nothing

Waiting for it in some higher place

I stared blankly toward the lilac bush yet to bloom,

The white sheep beckoning,

The containment of objects to a frame,

The gray street;

Nothing that mattered.

I couldn’t imagine the inside of the house,

Not without the suffocation

Of boxes

And the smell of old books,

Unopened food,

Stacks of photographs,

Unsealed grief—

A brief candle

Her building was sold off and torn down

A month after her passing.

I went home and stared at

The containment of rubble on her corner

It was already gone.

I went home and it was too late.

I would always be in this state of unmoving

Staring at the gilded frame,

Signifying nothing.

Her Best

The house sat brick upon brick

With this sickly green exterior

Frazzled by the landscape it doesn’t fit into

Shutters opened for the flowers

At the window sill accompanied by a note

Of condolence

The girl stands outside in a wooly dress

Wrong for the weather, but

It’s how her parents remember her best—

In the grass with her toys

Hat tossed to the side with the doll stroller

That scenery

Grassy and humid

Wooly and brick

Pantoum to Carry On

There once was a closet inside the bedroom

Where my father slept when he lived with his grandmother

And my sister and I would later play pretend

Among the stacks of papers and boxes

My father used to sleep at his grandmother’s house

Inside this room before he moved in with my mother

Among the stacks of papers and boxes—

These things that he would insist on keeping

This home with my mother

Was two blocks away from this closet-room

These things that he would insist on keeping

Only grew harder to contain in both spaces

To walk two blocks away from this home

Was a ritual my sister and I would do each weekend

As we became harder to contain in one space

And we found new treasures to play with

Each weekend, in this closet my sister and I

Would play in boxes of my father’s memories

And we found new treasures to play with—

Rotary phones and cassette tapes and other antiques

My father would continue to keep these memories in boxes

But once the building with the closet was knocked down

The antiques were shoved into the garage

There once was a closet inside the bedroom

And once the building with the closet was knocked down,

All that remained were jagged memories of care

There once was a closet inside the bedroom

And there once was a grandmother, now there are more boxes

Mourning Picture

     Found poem after Adrienne Rich

What I Mean When I Say I’ve Moved On

It is simply offering words

Conjured through nights of unrest

That a dead relative may or may not

Have said in moments of ghastly heat

It is simply walking away from home

Led forth by the purity of youthful cares

Or astray with desires of growing pains

Whichever fits better into the picture

It is growing tired of asking and giving

And scaffolding other people’s dreams;

It is loaning myself out, never to be remembered

Tending to every lilac leaf and sprouting tree

It is simply sitting in a field beneath crackled clouds

Removing my ruby-ribboned hat, tweezing

Blades of grass with my fingers one by one, saying

I forgive you

I forgive you

I forgive you