On a recent evening, the Wilkins Meeting House came alive for the Winter Art Show, with electric guitar and piano setting the tone as parents, faculty, and students moved through the space, pausing to admire student artwork. At Proctor, every student participates in the arts – and the evidence was on every wall and inch of table space of the three floors of the Meeting House lobbies and hallways. These finished pieces would hold their own at any fine art gallery opening. What was even more striking were the students themselves – the spark in their eyes as they described the process, eager to share not just what they had made but everything it had taken to make it.
Not every student arrives at Proctor having found their spark, and for many, the arts are where they find it, building what this Proctor-Parent Partnership post highlights as “islands of competence”: domains where genuine capability takes root, confidence compounds, and an enduring sense of self begins to form. Corby Leith '92, who teaches painting, drawing, and metal sculpture, describes the school's arts offerings as a 'buffet' – ceramics, textiles, studio art, photography, graphic design, woodworking, metal arts, and metal engineering – and an invitation to try their hand in “all the rooms.” One of his own classrooms is a working forge, where students learn traditional blacksmithing using coal fires, anvils, and steel. Every student begins with the same foundation: a quarter-inch square of steel stock, learning to draw it out, bend it, and form a scroll, then a barn hook, and finally a fork. After that, paths diverge – some toward industrial design, others toward sculpture – as students determine not just where they go but how far.
"It's good to explore, it's good to take risks, it's good to try new things. We want them to find the medium that excites them the most."
~ Corby Leith '92, Arts Faculty
In Your Brain on Art, Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross document what neuroscience has established about how the arts support learning. The brain builds knowledge not through rote memorization but through salient, embodied experiences – shifting synapses and encoding memory. Those benefits are not limited to the arts. Magsamen and Ross reference the research of psychologist Ellen Winner and professor Lois Hetland in Studio Thinking, which examined what students actually learn through visual arts education beyond the skill being directly taught. The arts build the capacity to observe with acuity, to envision, to reflect, to express, to explore, to take risks, and – perhaps most relevant to adolescent development – to engage and persist through frustration and mistakes along the way. The arts allow students to practice these skills and activate and strengthen the neural networks that enable them. A student who learns to persist in the arts studio is building cognitive structures they will draw on when faced with future challenges.
"There's so much growth that happens in the doing versus the thinking," Corby observes. The gap between having an idea and bringing it to life – and pushing through the challenges of making something – is where the real learning occurs. Corby uses a bicycle metaphor that resonates with any parent. Some students pick up a new skill quickly. Others are "kicking the bicycle down the street" for weeks. "Take both those students ten years later, and they can both ride." The frustration isn't an obstacle to learning; it is an essential component.
Nowhere at the Winter Art Show was this more visible than at the center of the downstairs lobby, where a gleaming wooden boat drew a steady crowd. Built from a Chesapeake Light Craft Skerry Daysailer design by Annie '26, working alongside faculty member Hunter Churchill '01, the hull is stunning, with varnished wood and brass hardware. Taped to the wall beside it were the original plans. What started as lines on paper became, step by step and week by week, something to admire – and, eventually, to sail.
The Winter Art Show is a moment in a longer journey, not an endpoint. "Reflecting and observing are as important as the doing," Corby emphasizes. For students who have rarely encountered visible evidence of their own growth, something shifts when the fork they forged, the canvas they painted, or the photos they developed in the darkroom hang on a wall or rest on a table.
"Everyone, I believe, has a medium," Corby explains, "and whether that becomes a profession or a passion or a hobby or just a variable in their life, I think it can just escalate whatever they choose to do in life." For some, the arts will become a career. For all students, it is preparation for a fuller life. Annie will leave for Mountain Classroom in the spring, and her Skerry Daysailer will be waiting for her to put the finishing touches on it when she returns – and so will everything she learned building it.
Learn More About the Arts at Proctor
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