Prints by famous painters enhance building hallways

By Nicole Arias
Staff Writer

The large Pablo Picasso poster "Girl Before a Mirror" looms over the stairway to the basement of the Electrical Engineering Building.

As one student stopped midway going down the stairs to stare, smeone carrying an expensive machine crashed into him, sending the machine flying.

Jameson Ludlam, a senior in the Schools of Engineering, recounted this scene to show that students notice the artwork displayed in buildings.

Last week, 26 posters were installed in the Electrical Engineering Building — 10 works by M.C. Escher, eight by Claude Monet and eight by Ken Dones, a current Australian artist.

Each poster cost approximately $100, said Marian Delp, the coordinator of the poster collection. Funding for the posters came from donations to the schools of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Furnishing campus buildings with posters is done by the Visual Arts Committee, which the University Senate sponsors. The committee collaborates with schools that request posters and uses donations to buy them.

The committee has installed approximately 2,200 posters in Purdue buildings since the poster collection was started more than 30 years ago. Of those, 10 percent are permanent installations, Delp said. The rest of the posters are part of the lending collection and can be exchanged for other pieces at the poster exchange each fall.

Delp said that each semester between 15 to 20 posters are installed around campus as permanent hallway installations.

Ludlam, who spends 70 hours a week in the Electrical Engineering Building, said, "The posters make the building more pleasant to be in."

Although Ludlam enjoys the artworks, he does have one complaint. "I don't like the format," he said. "They are accenting the entire set, not the print."

The print doesn't stand out with the black matting; they could have used other colors and made the prints bigger, Ludlam said.

Asli Kumcu, a senior in the Schools of Engineering, said she liked that the posters were clustered because it allows people to see the versatility of the artist and it makes a larger impact.

"The Eschers are an artistic expression of mathematics," she said. "Engineering is not just about equations and numbers; it is also about being creative."

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