Campus art in the limelight on new website
The “Sixty-Strut Tensegrity Sphere” sculpture, which hangs in the Engineering Centers Building atrium, is “both a feat of engineering and an object of beauty,” according to a new website featuring campus’s public art.
A newly launched UW–Madison website seeks to fill a niche by giving students, staff and visitors digital access to information about and images of the public art they can see across campus.
The Division of Facilities Planning and Management has partnered with an art history graduate student to create the site, which highlights UW–Madison public art that exists outside of a traditional gallery setting.
The site has information on 20 pieces of art, including campus icons like the Abraham Lincoln statue on Bascom Hill and the Camp Randall Memorial Arch. Each piece of art is accompanied by a visual description, photographs taken from multiple angles, information about the artist and directions to the artwork’s location.
Targeting a wide audience, the website will maintain a limited scope rather than document every single artwork. There are over 1,000 publicly accessible works of art on campus — not otherwise included in museums or gallery collections — and to include all of them would be overwhelming.
“The Library” mosaic by James Watrous, a former UW professor, greets visitors by the main entrance of Memorial Library.
Photo: Daniel Einstein
“We were really thoughtful about how we wanted to present information,” says Berit Ness, the graduate student involved with the project. “We wanted to put together a highlight tour so that it is very approachable to both incoming visitors on campus but also to the university community as a whole.”
However, for true art aficionados, the site also provides a bibliography of external links for each piece, allowing people to learn more if they so choose.
The project was made possible by a Brittingham Fund grant, coordinated by Daniel Einstein, the historic cultural resources manager for Campus Planning and Landscape Architecture, and Lauren Kroiz, a former UW–Madison art history professor.
The website relies heavily on aesthetics to capture the attention of the audience. The home page features pictures of all 20 artworks and a map displays the locations of each piece. Created with the Division of Information Technology, the website has the capacity to potentially accommodate more works in the future.
“The Social Benefits of Biochemical Research” by John Steuart Curry resides in the DeLuca Biochemistry Building. For the main panel, pictured above, Curry used “strong directional light to distinguish the healthy from the sick.”
Photo: Robin Davies
In addition to familiar pieces of art like the Lincoln statue, the site also features two murals from noted Midwestern artist John Steuart Curry and several works by former UW professor James Watrous. Despite the local prominence of these artists, visitors would have previously had difficulty finding the art or even knowing it was on campus.
“Public art on campus is a great way to orient yourself with the university community,” Ness says. “So many of the artists who are included on this website had personal or professional relationships with the university.”
— Jim Dayton