Travels & Art

Murals at Willard Straight Hall

I've been taking my son, who is a junior, on a tour of various colleges.  One of the joys of travel is finding quirky objects of interest and of course, ART in unexpected places.  These are murals painted by Alison Mason Kingsbury under the auspices of Ezra King in the entry room of Willard Straight Hall in Cornell University in Ithaca, NY.  The student guide rushed us through this with not a word (but gushed at us for minutes over the School for International Business and Labor Relations) proving itself little better than a benighted heathen.

Sorry about the glove up there, it was cold and I was being rushed into the great hall!  But isn't that just a lovely unicorn and a real treasure of a room?  More about the artist here:

http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/alisonmasonkingsbury/exhibition/wshmural/index.html

Willard Straight Hall.  The carvings in the ceiling are of good and bad professors, but you can't make it out from my iphone pix.

The new Engineering building.  It looks a bit like a large indoor mall at first, but those are 3 sided rooms for students to gather and discuss things, and the grey wall and stairs are supposed to reflect the many gorges on the Cornell campus.

I don't know what this was about, but it was amusing.

 Just can't resist taking a pix of an anatomically correct statue of a Human/Transformers hybrid.

This is Cornell's Biological Sciences building (or one of them, dealing more with plant biology) so my son was quite tickled by the fact that they've let plants grow all over it.  Even their metal gates are sprouting!

Jody