Darby Raymond-Overstreet’16 is a studio art intern for the studio art department. At Dartmouth, she majored in studio art and psychology and was heavily involved with the Native Americans at Dartmouth community. She is an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation and she is from Flagstaff, Ariz.
She considers her biggest artistic achievement at Dartmouth to be completing her thesis in studio art. As a student, she was awarded the Marcus Heiman-Martin R. Rosenthal ’56 Achievement Award in the Creative Arts, the Perspectives on Design award and the Class of 1960 Office of Residential Life Purchase Award.
Now that she has graduated, she wants to continue to build her art portfolio and is considering pursuing a Masters of Fine Arts.
Did you come to Dartmouth knowing that you wanted to major in art?
DR: No, I didn’t, actually. I took a ‘Drawing I’ class with Colleen Randall my freshman winter and I just really liked it and Colleen was a really good mentor and professor during that time for me and she encouraged me to take more art classes. After that, I was thinking I would minor and then I ended up wanting to take more classes and finish out the major and it just kind of worked out.
Were you involved in art when you were in high school?
DR: Yeah, but not super seriously. I had always liked drawing my whole life but there wasn’t really a solid place to go for good instruction, so it was more of a hobby.
What was the studio art major like?
DR: It was kind of difficult. The professors really want a lot and expect a lot of their students — you invest so much of yourself in it if you take your art seriously and want it to be the best it can be. It’s difficult at times but it’s really rewarding. It’s my favorite department on campus and I thought the program was really awesome.
What can you say about arts at Dartmouth in general? Are there enough opportunities for scholarship? Are there any stigmas?
DR: I don’t know if there are stigmas but I think a lot of people on campus in general don’t really understand or know how much work doing art classes is. I feel like I see a lot of people taking introductory classes and they’re a lot more work than they expected and just a lot more of a time commitment than they had initially thought. So I guess the arts at Dartmouth are really underrated in terms of how hard it is. And I think it’s more critical than people would expect — like, it’s one thing to just make really pretty art that you would hang up on your wall, but it’s kind of another thing to be working on a project that’s about something that’s bigger than you or more important than just making a little design to throw up somewhere.
Is there any advice you would give to incoming freshmen about what it means to be involved in the arts at Dartmouth, and what they should do if they’re interested in being involved in the arts at Dartmouth?
DR: Yeah. Everyone has to start out with ‘Drawing I,’ so I would just advise that you know you have enough time to really invest yourself in it and get what you can out of the initial classes because in the end, you get out of it what you put into it.
What does your job at Dartmouth now consist of?
DR: I work as a studio art intern, so I work in the [Black Family Visual Arts Center] and I do monitor hours for the sculpture studio. I did that for the summer because there’s a summer position aside from the academic year position, but I’m going to be doing both, so I’ll be at Dartmouth through the spring.
This article has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
