Returning to Her Roots

Sarah Jacobs’ Career Comes Full Circle

 

Sarah Jacobs was at a crossroads.

Should she pursue tenure after years of being an art professor at universities along the East Coast—or fulfill her lifelong dream of becoming a full-time artist?

For Sarah, a Littlestown native, art was a part of the family fabric. She remembers as a child painting next to her mother, an artist herself. “When she was painting, she had me paint along so that I would be focused and not bother her,” Sarah says with a smile in her voice. “That ended up working out for me.”

Sarah continued her passion for art by earning a bachelor’s degree in art history from Gettysburg College and Master of Fine Arts from Maryland Institute of Art in Baltimore. After moving abroad for a few years, she returned to the United States and started teaching art at the university level.

Then, two-and-a-half years ago, Sarah was about to apply for tenure when she took time for self-reflection. “It’s not that I didn’t like teaching anymore,” she says, “it’s that I always wanted to do this.”

Sarah cashed in her retirement account and started her dream career in Erie before moving back to Adams County. “I think part of it is being a little audacious and just going forward with it,” she says of becoming a full-time artist, “but I also think that I’ve had a lot of really lucky breaks, with a lot of people helping me.”

It’s been harrowing at times, learning how to run a small business and building relationships with galleries, all while creating art. But today, Sarah has a few galleries representing her work, including one in New York City and another in Pittsburgh, and she’s busy working on private and public art commissions and other pieces—all from her home base in Gettysburg.

A mural for this year’s People Project is one of the art projects Sarah was recently commissioned to create. This five-panel piece will be installed on the outside of the Adams County Arts Council’s Art Education Center on South Washington Street.

Sarah worked with students from Lincoln Intermediate Unit 12’s Migrant Education Program for one panel and a group of senior women for another to capture their idea of “at home.”

The students’ main thoughts of home revolved around soccer. “A lot of the kids in the group played soccer at home with their brothers and sisters and friends, and they were really enthusiastic about that,” says Sarah. “And one of the teachers had talked about where she grew up, there were no lightning bugs and she loves seeing them here every year, because they were such a surprise to her the first summer she lived in this area.”

In the senior women’s conversations, fire was their visual element of “at home”—gathering in the backyard, roasting marshmallows around a fire, enjoying a cozy fire in front of the fireplace in the winter, and even candles displayed in the windows of many Adams County homes, says Sarah. They also wanted to ensure that the county’s rural and town settings, as well as the battlefield, would be represented.

Pulling from these impressions, Sarah and the students created a twilight soccer scene for their panel. For the women’s art panel, they painted a night scene of a couple by a bright fire with fields and the lights of town also included.

With Sarah’s guidance, the participants painted elements of each of their concepts, and Sarah pieced together those elements and added her own interpretation based on their conversations. For the final three panels, Sarah used stories collected from the community as inspiration.

While she has worked on public art murals in other cities, this mural has special meaning for her. It’s one that she will get to see often now that she calls Gettysburg home, and Sarah says she’s thankful the Adams County Arts Council asked her to be a part of it.

“The idea of place making, particularly with public art, is important,” she says. “And it’s important in making the community feel proud of their environment. Similar to the way that music elicits feelings, the visual arts do that as well. “

What does at home in Adams County mean to Sarah? “That is something that I had to think about with this project,” she says. “And, for me, I think home is like a sanctuary—a place where I can just relax and be myself.”