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Final touches put on career
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Jody Nudell, an art teacher who is retiring from Liberty High School, is surrounded by art projects from this year’s students. Nudell’s last day at her post will be Feb. 29, after 17 years at Liberty and four decades of art education.
By Robert GuttersohN
Liberty
Jody Nudell, art teacher for 17 years at Liberty High School, is retiring after a career that has spanned four decades and began in Poland.
Her last day will be Feb. 29.
But, thanks mostly to her, she is leaving a building where paintings and sculptures occupy the once-bland hallways of the high school, giving its white walls an art- museum appearance.
The Jumble Drake sculpture, which can only be described as a goose with two sets of butterfly wings, hovers over students entering and exiting the cafeteria.
There is the Spectacle of Speed, a large sculpture of the Packard hood ornament painted in the dotted style of Roy Lichtenstein.
And there are the benches spotted throughout the school’s atrium painted in various styles.
But not one was painted by her. Instead, they all were painted and designed by former students under her guidance.
“I look at my mark as being my students and what they have accomplished,” said Nudell recently during a tour of the school with The Vindicator. “These things are nice reminders of that.”
Nudell, 62, said she can’t remember an age when she did not have a paintbrush in her hand and a canvas before her.
“It’s just something I always did,” Nudell said.
She comes from a family of artists, art teachers and fashion designers; creativity came naturally to her.
She remembers her first definitive art piece as a child: a pastel sunset she painted in fifth grade. A year later, she created a collection of paintings that her sixth-grade teacher kept but returned to her recently upon recognizing Nudell’s name on a series of paintings she did for Youngstown State University.
But outside of a few commissions, she used most of her talent teaching students.
After receiving a master’s degree in art education from Pennsylvania State University, she began teaching in 1971 in Poland, where she taught seventh-, eighth- and ninth-graders.
After nine years there, she took time away from teaching to raise her two children: Brad, now 31 and married to Courtney, and Connie, 28 and living in Baltimore.
She returned to teaching at Akiva Academy for eight years before landing at Liberty High School in 1995.
The current high school opened in fall 1999 without the “bells and whistles” because the district had to fund the $10 million construction on its own, said board member Diana DeVito.
For the next 13 years, Nudell added those bells and whistles, first by adding the large painting of a leopard, the district’s mascot, on the wall facing the high school’s entrance. Then, year after year, she added more.
“She changed the whole atmosphere as soon as you enter,” DeVito said.
Throughout her career as an art educator, Nudell has wanted her students to see the beauty in different subjects. It’s a talent not many art educators have, as Liberty Superintendent Stan Watson can attest.
“She takes the time to see the individual talents in the students,” Watson said, rather than shoehorning all students into the same art disciplines. “It’s a testament to her caring attitude to her students.”
And the array of art on display at the school is a testament to that.
In addition to the Jumble Drake and the life-size hood ornament, a ceramic- tile mural set above the cafeteria entrance depicts different scenes unfolding in apartment windows. Each window was designed by a different student. The Youngstown State University Penguin on display is an assortment of famous paintings with penguins replacing their legendary subjects.
And atop a shelf sits a plaster sculpture of a student reading a book. Nudell said the model for the sculpture was actually wrapped in cloth strips that were covered with plaster to make a mold for the sculpture.
Nudell also is a defender of art programs, particularly as school districts across the country are slashing their art programs due to decreasing revenue.
“In art, they can’t just spit out answers,” she said. “They have to think, and they have to create.”
In the future, she wants to focus on her own art, traveling and catching up on reading. The part that will be hardest to adjust to is not teaching. Some of her students have gone on to prestigious art or design schools around the country. And some of their art she has kept as examples for other students. And some, as her sixth-grade teacher did with her pieces, Nudell plans to keep.