Last June, former studio arts department head Michelle Cobb announced her departure from GDS, leaving ceramics and sculpture teacher Sarah Riley to take over the position.
In Riley’s first weeks as department chair, she has implemented a faculty art show and encouraged teachers to personalize their curriculum, and she said she hopes to make the studio art department more accessible to all GDS students.
Riley came to GDS in 2024, and every teacher in the studio arts department has come to GDS since the 2024-25 school year. “It’s kind of like a new makeup of teachers,” Riley said. Riley said it was important to “hold onto things that were working but feel empowered and empower the teachers in their spaces to make the choices that make the most sense for them and their students today.”
“I think it’s actually going to be really good to have new people that are going to settle in, find their ways, build on what Michelle has and add their new perspective,” junior and UL drawing and painting student Nadia Bandy said.
“We started the year with a faculty art show, which hasn’t happened before,” Riley said, “just to set the tone at the start of the year that you don’t have to have an MFA to be an artist,” she added. “I want students in art classes—and just in any class, students in the community—to see the faculty here as multifaceted human beings that have a lot of different interests and skills.”
Drawing and painting teacher Mark Giaimo said Riley has encouraged faculty in the department to use their own experience and skills to inform how they teach students. “We’re kind of adjusting the curriculum work towards my skillset, which is portrait and figure,” Giaimo said.
Riley has also been working with the college counseling office to promote college visits specifically about art. “Students who are interested in art are in [the art rooms] often, and they might not see the email from the college office,” Riley said. She added that though the college counseling office organizes the visits, she informs the students about them. Riley said the college visits “might reach them in a different way when it’s advertised in the actual spaces that they’re occupying in their day-to-day.”
“I think that Sarah [Riley] has really, even since just the beginning of this year, really taken over that role and just had a really strong presence,” Bandy said. She added that, even though she has not taken Riley’s ceramics classes, she feels comfortable asking Riley questions about different art forms.
“She has an infectious positivity, and she brings it to every single lesson and class,” sophomore and advanced ceramics student Tessa Lipman said of Riley’s teaching style. “She’s really good at encouraging teamwork and helping out everybody when you can.”
Riley said the inspiration for many of the changes she has made to the department comes from her own experience attending a large high school. “I really wanted to be in [an artistic] space, but I felt like there was a right way and a wrong way to be in that space,” Riley said. “I think that’s one of the reasons I really care about accessibility and connection is just the more curious we are, the more open we are to learning, the more learning will actually happen.”
Riley hopes to collaborate with her team and GDS as a whole to create a more open arts community. “I think something that’s really energizing for me is that I don’t know what’s going to happen yet,” Riley said. “My hope is that [the studio art department] feels like it’s our department—the faculty members, the students that are here—so there’s space for new ideas to be brought in. There’s space for new things to be started.”