What Happened to the GCC Campus Murals?
After ten years in the entrance hallway of the GCC, Santiago Leyba ‘14’s campus mural, which covered another mural by Tess Hulls ‘07, has been removed. The Quest reached out to Cooley Gallery Director and Curator Stephanie Snyder ‘91 for more information about the removal of this piece along with details about the process of proposing campus murals, encouraging students to consider submitting more proposals.
Both GCC murals have been around for a long time. In 2014, Leyba’s vinyl mural went on top of Hull's mural from 2007. The sudden disappearance of the mural this semester may feel jarring to returning students, but, as Snyder explains, the murals have been up for longer than originally anticipated. “Longevity is the area where things got kind of knotted around Tessa and Santiago's mural,” said Snyder.
According to Facilities, murals are guaranteed to remain on campus for a minimum of three years. “We worked with Facilities to see, like, what period of time could they give us that we could say to a student, ‘we will guarantee that your mural will stay up for X amount of time,’ and they said we could do three years,” Snyder continued. “So once a mural is painted or affixed, Facilities will not touch it for three years, which is lovely, right? I mean, that's a nice chunk of time, and the only reason that anyone would touch it would be if it were vandalized, or if there were some kind of building disaster.”
With the pandemic, however, fewer students were submitting proposals for campus murals and general awareness of the process decreased. “As the pandemic came, it just kind of all fell apart,” said Snyder. “People stopped submitting, and I think [it’s] just [the loss of] institutional memory. People didn't realize, you know, that the program existed and they could propose something.” Notably, last academic year, a few new murals were painted by the Reed Community Pantry.
Ultimately, because of its age and the frequent vandalism, Facilities removed Leyba’s mural. As of yet, nothing is currently planned for that wall. “That wall is really hard,” Snyder said. “When Tessa’s mural was up—and that's all that was there [at the time]—people were putting signs on top of the mural, and it was so hard, it was basically impossible to get people to stop doing that.”
Moreover, the space in the GCC is especially exposed and is frequently vandalized. “It's such a high-traffic area, I've come into Commons sometimes and seen, like, a food splatter down the mural,” Snyder explained. “People really felt like whatever was painted there was way too vulnerable, and it's not a place that engenders respect.” The Art Collections Management Committee (ACMC), which oversees part of the proposal application, voted to no longer use that wall for future murals.
The large wall in the GCC corridor is indeed a challenge to work with, but offers an interesting perspective on the utility of art. The murals of Leyba and Hulls highlight the difficult balance between wanting to preserve a piece of art, which is intended to be temporary, while at the same placing artwork in such an unprotected space with the knowledge that it will be damaged. On the other hand, it may be fruitful to consider the functionality of different murals and their contribution to a space and to the people in it.
The Senate Murals Committee, consisting of two senators, typically announces a call for mural proposals once a year. While they collaborate with the Cooley Gallery Curator and the ACMC, the selection process is ultimately up to the student senators as they present their choices to the others in the committee. Proposals are assessed based on their quality, appropriateness, and relevance to the space, in addition to the applicant’s capability for seeing the project through. The Cooley Gallery funds the materials for the artist, and the artwork is recorded and archived in the school’s database.
Snyder emphasizes the student’s role in the creation of the mural. “The student senators collect proposals, and then they study them, and they go back to the people who propose them, if they need, like, a better drawing, or if it's unclear about the materials or the timeframe. So they help the artist submit a perfect proposal that can then come to us,” said Snyder. Once the senators choose proposals, they present and advocate them to the ACMC. “When they send them to us, we see them as something that we don't need to really scrutinize, you know, the student senators have done that [already]. It's more of, like, taking a look and making sure we don't see any issues [and] ask them questions. And then, up until now, we've never had a situation where we haven't approved them.”
With the semester just starting, there is ample opportunity for more murals at Reed. “I'm very interested, too, in how all of this can coincide with Reed Arts Week and other student-centered creative initiatives on campus,” said Snyder. “There's all these awesome things that are happening, but they're all fragmented, you know? I would just love to see things come together more often.”