Art for All – the Phillips Hall Geog-Anth Wall Mural

Top: Prof Gannon & Josie
Bottom: Samara


In an ongoing effort to improve our environment and make it warmer and more welcoming for our students, the Department of Geography and Anthropology inquired of Art and Design for some graphic arts students to paint a geographically themed piece of work on our walls. We were especially interested in doing something with the west hallway on the Phillips Science Hall's second floor.  For years, the hallway has maintained a clinical, stark and quite uninviting look.

Before: March 2014

During: April 2014


Junior Josie Kallenbach and Senior Samara Cobus responded to the invitation.  They visited the hallway with their advisor, Associate Professor Ned Gannon of Art and Design, and identified a corrugated section of wall on the north end of the hall, a strange corner that joins two parts of the building.  They began drafting a landscape that took on something of an Amazonian motif.  We liked the initial design and its nature-society interplay and asked our colleague Jeff DeGrave – a Latin American specialist who teaches a course on the regional geography of Latin America – to work with Josie and Samara to finalize the design.  He did, they did, and with Prof. Gannon's help, they began transferring the design to the wall in April; they put the final touches on the mural at the beginning of July. Thank you, Josie, Samara and Ned for using your talents to enhance our environment.  We look forward to more Haas-Phillips collaboration.

Please feel free to stop by and see the mural.  We are not sure where this initiative will lead, but all who see the landscape mural and the color it brings like it , and  there is still plenty of empty wall in that Phillips Science Hall's west hallway. I would be happy if other art students were interested in building on this project.  I look forward to hearing from them.

After:  Final Mural, July 2014



Comments

  1. AnonymousSeptember 9, 2014 at 7:07 AM

    Certainly livens a sterile corner of the building!

    ReplyDelete

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