Courtesy of Sarah Goodman Duffy ’26
If you´ve ever spotted a striking design around campus, a blue-washed painting, a handmade fanzine, something that stops you mid-stride and makes you look twice, there’s a good chance it came from Sarah Goodman Duffy ´26. A senior double majoring in educational studies and art, a PICA scholar, and a Holleran Center fellow, Sarah has spent four years at Connecticut College becoming the kind of person whose creativity has a way of quietly showing up everywhere.
The story of how she got here starts at home. “I learned how to draw from my grandmother,” she says. “The way that I make art is fundamentally informed by the relationship I had with her. In my childhood home our walls are entirely made up of her paintings and drawings, and she was the first artist I ever took inspiration from. “That early immersion shaped not just how Sarah makes art, but where she has chosen to take it, “she was a major influence in my decision to major in art at Connecticut College and why I decided to become an art teacher.”
This year, that artistic practice has taken the form of an ambitious honors thesis. “I’m doing an art honors thesis called ´Making Sense of Sitters´, which explores how portraiture can be used as a tool to explore people,” she explains. Working primarily in paint and ink, her body of work has been built around the idea that sitting with someone, really looking at them, is itself a form of understanding.
That same impulse to understand people carries directly into her community work. As a Holleran Center fellow, Sarah leads the Enrich Mentorship Program, an after-school program for students at Bennie Dover Jackson Multi-Magnet Middle School here in New London. It’s work that sits squarely at the intersection of her two majors, and it points clearly toward where she’s headed. “I will be attending the University of Maryland’s Master of Education in Art Education with certification,” she says. “So in about a year from now, I will be living out my kooky, social justice-oriented, art teacher dreams.”
When asked who at Connecticut College inspires her to keep creating, her answer is telling. “The people in my life are my biggest inspirations. My family, friends, teachers, coworkers, and peers. I am made up of all the people I surround myself with. The art I make is a reflection of that.” It’s a sentiment that makes her thesis feel all the more personal: every portrait, a kind of tribute.
Some of that work is currently on display just off campus. “I currently have my artwork up at Washington Street Coffee House,” she says. “I have been a regular there since freshman year, and it feels so full circle to have the opportunity to showcase my art in their space. It is a collection of my art from my thesis.” The show runs through May 15th, a fitting close to four years of making, mentoring, and paying attention to people in New London.
For any artist on campus who needs to hear it, she leaves this: “Just keep making art. I think there is often this notion that art is either fundamentally good or bad, and the best thing you can do is to keep making art despite whatever anyone thinks about it.”
