Stuck in the past

By Norah Lubeck and Conrad Hamel

Most of Riverside’s hallway art is over two decades old. Students say it’s time for an update.

Covering the whitewashed walls of Riverside’s hallways are pieces of student art from the 1990s and early 2000s. 

Based on the plaques at the bottom of most pieces, the art is, on average, 26 years old. And while current students think it’s impressive work, many also want to update it.

“A lot of this work up here is really good, but it’s not necessarily relevant today,” senior art student Henry Lines said. “A lot of people are making stuff more relevant to what’s going on right now.” 

But it takes more than new student art to change the outdated artwork. The art department at Riverside has faced heavy turnover, a limited budget, and more work requirements from the district, all of which have made it even more difficult to update the halls. 

History

Art at Riverside was once continuously updated, largely due to the efforts of the former art teacher Helen Griffin, who worked at Riverside from 1991 to 2011. Griffin declined an interview for this article, but according to other primary sources, she was the main person responsible for fundraising, framing, and hanging art in the school.

“[The artwork was from] Griffin and her students,” said former journalism and math teacher Steven Unruhe. “They put in hours and hours of work over and beyond school to produce work that was quality enough to be framed and put up in the school. It was a major push by her over a period of seven/eight years.” 

Art from students would be nominated, framed, and then placed on the walls. Each of the pieces of art hanging in the school was purchased from the student artist for $50 to $100. The process was paid for by donations and projects from the art department, such as an annual holiday card drive.

“[Griffin] had a belief that students who were artists should realize that being an artist could be a job, and they could make money,” said Margaret Harrison, who worked in the Riverside media center until 2014. 

Art stopped being updated after Griffin left Riverside. 

“When I first started working here, it was one of my favorite things about this building, that every year we were putting new stuff up,” said English teacher Matt Smith, who has been at Riverside for 23 years. “After she left, we just pretty much stopped putting up new stuff.”

Impact on the school environment

Riverside students, teachers, and former employees all agree that the art has an important impact on the school. 

“When [the art] went up, it totally changed the feeling in the school,” Unruhe said. “It went from bare concrete walls with the kind of dumb posters that schools put up to all this beautiful stuff all over the school, so you could really go to school with some wonderful artwork. It was great.”

The art displayed at Riverside reflects the collective work and perspectives of multiple generations of students. Research on learning environments has consistently shown a relationship between students’ sense of belonging and the physical spaces they occupy. Classroom practices that visually represent diverse student identities and experiences have been found to increase students’ feelings of inclusion and engagement, according to a 2024 Edutopia article by Michele Lamons-Raiford. Additionally, a 2019 University of Oxford dissertation found that student-created classroom displays significantly enhanced students’ confidence, motivation, and sense of ownership over their learning.

“[The art] was great,” current Riverside art teacher Emily Matheson said. “It showed the creativity of students. It was freedom of expression. And the school really enjoyed having the students’ artwork displayed, because it showed how they view art and how they view things in their own voice compared to others.”

But when an environment doesn’t change, people experience habituation, which the National Institute of Health describes as how the response to something is diminished over time as its presence remains the same. 

A Pirates’ Hook survey about the art at Riverside backs up this idea. 60% of students who responded believe that the current art on the Riverside walls is not relevant today, and 77% think that Riverside would benefit from updating or incorporating new artwork. A majority of respondents agreed that art had an important impact on the school environment, saying that the art made the school feel more “positive,” “put together,” and “less depressing.”

“[Not rotating in new artwork] would reduce the impact,” Unruhe said. “Anytime you can have new stuff and rotate it through, so that people don’t just get used to it, it would be helpful.” 

Jacob Streilein was an art student at Riverside from 2006 to 2010. He now works as a storyboard artist in animation, currently at Skydance Media, and has previously worked for Netflix, Nickelodeon, Paramount, and Disney. Some of his pieces, which he created for The Pirates’ Hook, are located by the school entrance hallway. 

Streilein recalls Griffin pushing to put up a lot of pieces, especially in her final years at Riverside. 

“It was nice to see what people had made in both the hallways in the library,” he said.  “And as an art student, I always found it inspiring to see pieces that former students had made that I thought were well drawn or well painted or something, and [it] made me want to reach their level of skill.”

Streilein thinks that it would definitely benefit Riverside and its students to update its art. 

“If you’ve done a piece and it’s hung up in the school, I think it feels good as the artist, and it’s also nice to see what your peers are making, especially if it does become something that they do for their life,” he said. “It’s always nice to know what interests your peers and classmates have and what skills they’re good at.” 

An uncertain future

Over the years, some pieces have fallen down and broken. Others have been removed or replaced with posters and honor roll lists.

“There are two pieces in my classroom that used to be up in prominent places in the building that were going to be tossed,” Smith said.”So I grabbed them rather than letting them go.”

One of the pieces in Smith’s room is a piece Streilein worked on during his senior year at Riverside. 

“A friend and I did this giant piece of a guy sitting,” Streilein said. “It featured his shoes. It [had] a big paint spatter, and was a piece on canvas.” Streilein said.

It features the Durham skyline, which is missing newer prominent buildings like One City Center and the Novis, which were built after he graduated. 

The piece used to hang on a wall by the entrance to the school, but was removed to make room for an honor roll poster during the 2022-2023 school year. The poster has never been updated. 

“We don’t give students a chance to feel like they are part of the permanent legacy of schools sometimes,” Smith said. “I think that the art that’s in the building is a permanent legacy. So I think [students] are missing out in that way.”

The newest art pieces on the walls date to around 2011. Riverside’s current art teachers are in the process of getting newer work up on the walls despite setbacks that make it difficult to find the time and money for the project. 

“I know a lot of teachers and students have been asking about [updating the artwork], and I just want people to know, we do hear them,” Matheson said. “We do hear y’all’s voice.”

Matheson explained that challenges with the district, budget cuts, and the teachers’ shortage have made keeping art updated difficult. 

“[The district] wants us to do extra duties that are outside of what we should be doing, which is affecting our teaching capabilities, and we’re not being paid for it, which is causing us to fall behind,” she said. 

But as turnover within the art department has slowed, the teachers feel more able to work on it. Matheson is collaborating with fellow art teacher Maegan Fitzgerald and photography teacher Emma Stevens to update the walls, perhaps by the end of this school year.

“We are working on starting to change things this semester,” Matheson said. 

Fitzgerald is developing programs that will help in the process of creating new art. This year, she started a National Art Honors Society.

“We’re trying to re-up our art department rather than just [have the] art club,” Fitzgerald said. “And so with that, I want to instill a legacy where students are going to go through and document every piece, get their size, get the matting, and then one student who’s a senior can choose to make a piece to replace it.”

Fitzgerald’s plan is to slowly replace the majority of the artwork with new pieces. But it’s unlikely that paying the students for their art will return.

“Purchasing from students and getting things framed would take a lot of fundraising because we don’t have it as a department or as a school in general,” she said. 

Art students are already working on pieces to update some of the older pieces currently up on the walls. 

“We’re just trying to bring a more modern look to the art in the school,”  Senior Shaniyah Bethea said. “We’re gonna take all the old art and make it new.”

“Being able to show our art is a big thing,” Bethea said. “It shows how talented we are. It shows our progress as teenagers.”

Lines hopes the new plan will ultimately fill the walls with current students’ work. 

“Art communicates what’s going on in people’s lives,” he said. “It’s going to change a lot over time, so it doesn’t really make sense to keep up older art [because] it’s representing these old people in the past that were experiencing things that we’re not even experiencing now.”