In the last five years at Sartell High School, Cori Schneider has caused a ripple effect throughout the art community. Ever since Cori can remember, she has loved art. While other girls were playing with stuffed animals and dolls, Cori was more interested in the coloring books her mom gave her. This love for art later evolved into Cori’s decision to major in marketing and advertising in college.

Many years later, Cori started a family and had many opportunities to explore the culturally rich art environment of Europe. While living in and exploring Europe, she was exposed to a lot of art history which took her love, appreciation, and knowledge of art to a new level. Cori then moved back to the United States, but after being exposed to all of the European art, she knew she wanted to do her part to make a contribution to the art world. Then, an idea came upon her one day while walking into Sartell High School.  SHS was a solid building doing solid things, but it wasn’t necessarily the prettiest place.  Cori saw something different though.  She saw a beautiful building that had so much potential, and with a little help from her artistic knowledge, she knew she could make Sartell High School into the beautiful building it was meant to be.

Since that first thought, Cori has helped drastically transform SHS. To date, Cori has made over 14 pieces of art possible, and still has around nine projects in the works. It is possible that some of the projects that are currently in the works may not even make it past the drawing board because of how much time and planning they take. These intricate projects can take from a couple of months all the way to two years or more to complete. Despite all the effort these projects take, Cori loves what she does. She takes her inspiration for these projects from many different places, and she always keeps ideas in mind. Many projects even come to her while walking by an empty wall, and thus the creative planning process begins.

Cori has successfully gotten SHS on track to be transformed into what she envisioned it to be.  Despite the fact that she accomplished her goal, Cori doesn’t plan on stopping there. When Cori moves to Texas later this year, she plans on continuing to spread her artistic talents throughout the community of Austin, Texas. Cori loves public art and thinks she may take further interest in that. Although Cori is moving to Texas, the art at SHS will not stop there. She has inspired many people at Sartell to get involved in art. We told Cori she has definitely made a major ripple effect here at Sartell, and when told that, she smiled and said, “I guess that is all you can hope for.”