Sarah Richart has made the familiar faces of Mount Rushmore, the Mona Lisa and the Wizard of Oz even more familiar to the UNMC community.
With an artist’s touch, she has replaced the famous faces with those of her less famous UNMC colleagues. The comical and eye-catching posters encourage Business and Finance employees to nominate deserving coworkers for the Chancellor’s Silver ‘U’ Award.
For her outstanding job performance and “behind the scenes” creativity in helping to recognize others, Richart has received the Chancellor’s Gold ‘U’ Award for July.
“Of all my successes, being chosen for the Gold ‘U’ is the crowning glory,” Richart said. “To be in the same award category as other people I’ve read about, well, that’s tremendous.”
Wearing her trademark, long, black skirts, the 23-year-old has done more than simply design colorful promotional posters. She has made UNMC’s Center for Healthy Living a more colorful place with her footprints on the wall and her smiles behind the front counter.
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“Being able to cut, paste, distort, render and digitally alter posters with computer software is what Sarah does with flair,” her nominator said. “With her artistic touch, employees’ photos have replaced the presidential faces on Mount Rushmore, the Mona Lisa and Romeo and Juliet.”
A native of Loveland, Colo., Richart graduated from high school in 1997. She briefly pursued an art career at a Denver art school, then decided “painting seemed like a side career to a career.”
When her mother moved to Nebraska, she followed and eventually applied to UNMC in hopes of landing a secretarial position in one of the clinics. Instead, she found an opening at the gym.
“At first, I told them I wasn’t sporty and shouldn’t apply at the gym,” she said. But, the staff at the Center for Healthy Living contacted her about a possible job and “it ended up being a good fit,” Richart said.
She joined the staff in December 1998. Within six months, Richart had assumed so much additional work that she had changed her job description. Today, she is the primary support for the Center for Health Living team (Cheri Anderson, Jayme Nekuda, Peter Pellerito and Rick Pruch), helps to coordinate and supervise the front desk staff that work nights and weekends and assists with their payroll. She also contributes to the Business and Finance department newsletter and designs the Health e-Headlines newsletter.
Richart thoroughly enjoys her diverse role. “My days are never the same,” she said. “Management is so supportive of anything I can pursue in a work-related fashion and I enjoy meeting people from all areas of campus. Rarely does someone come here in a bad mood, working out at the center is always one of the fun parts of their day.”
Richart’s artwork is visible throughout the fitness center. “Her use of graphics can clearly get any point across that we are trying to convey to our staff and customers,” her nominator said.
Recently, Richart built a database to catalogue the center’s new wellness library and created colorful paper footprints that lead visitors past the treadmills and free weights to the library.
Richart eventually plans to return to school to finish her degree – most likely in a field related to graphic arts and business or marketing. Beyond that, she is not tied to any preconceived ideas. “I’m too young to say what I’m going to be,” she said. “This is the perfect place for me to be while I figure that out.”
In the meantime, Richart is “mom” to a 50-pound, 5-month old St. Bernard named Sadie. She volunteers for the St. Vincent DePaul Society, writing their annual newsletter and once serving as a motivational speaker. She also enjoys oil painting, reading, doing home repairs and visiting her four siblings in Omaha, Colorado and Minnesota.