One night early in my senior year, as I was trying to go to sleep, I heard a scrabbling sound coming through the wall of my room in the Terra co-op. Reluctant to attribute the noise to a rodent infestation, the next morning I asked my next-door neighbor if she might possibly have been doing something around midnight that might possibly have made an unusual sound. Yes, she replied. She had been sponge-painting her walls. Sponge painting? Yes, a nice, dark terra-cotta shade. Had I seen the lime-green room she lived in last year?
This scene wasn’t as unusual as it may appear. Between the late 1970s and the mid-1990s, students festooned certain Row houses—primarily co-ops—with scores of murals, both in their bedrooms and in common areas like lounges, kitchens and dining rooms. (Even terra-cotta sponge paint qualified as a mural, it seemed, and could remain as long as successive occupants were amenable.) The ethnic theme houses Ujamaa, Casa Zapata and Okada also boast several murals, some designed by professional artists who worked with students to execute the painting.
Murals serve co-ops’ self-management ethos and ethnic theme dorms’ desire to illustrate cultural heritage, explains associate director of residential education John Judicki. “We try to give the house leadership the flexibility to build identity,” he says. “We’re not going to say, ‘You have to use University pictures on your walls.’”
But nor are students supposed to use paint on their walls, anymore. Since Stanford inaugurated an 18-year overhaul of student residences in 1992, it has, for the most part, adhered to a policy stating, “No new murals are permitted to be painted directly on walls, ceilings, etc.” Instead, the University supplies custom-size canvases to students who want to create murals in their residences’ common areas.
The new policy has, perhaps counterintuitively, led to something of a mural renaissance. The removal of some murals due to structural changes during renovation and the prohibition against painting new ones on walls have increased student interest in preserving those that remain. And the availability of free canvases has induced more residences to add color to their lounges and stairwells. Administrators can tally more than a dozen houses, from all-frosh dorms to fraternities, where students have picked up paintbrushes. Some highlights:
Each of the Enchanted Broccoli Forest’s six “pods” houses eight people and one mural theme. There’s Brain Damage, with attendant cerebral waves; Pepperland, which has a Beatles’ Yellow Submarine motif; the Tower, with lots of rock ’n’ roll memorabilia; Bedrock, which features The Flintstones' Barney Rubble; Wonderland, with all the Lewis Carroll favorites; and Deep Space, a sort of George Lucas light-speed homage. A dozen or so bedrooms have distinct murals, including scenes from Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax and One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish.
The mural themes at EBF reverberate through many of the other residences. There’s plenty of pop culture, including giant renderings of album art from Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones. There are images of childhood, echoed in Lambda Nu’s Sesame Street characters and Durand’s Calvin and Hobbes. And there’s the requisite New-Agey mural, which in EBF’s case contains butterflies surrounding the phrase, “Sometimes we live no particular way but our own.” Most of the murals at EBF are undated, but residents use handed-down tales—references to the academic prowess of the “people of Pepperland” in the ’80s, for example—to try to guess their vintage.
A number of murals on campus enjoy this kind of lore. One wall of the Durand dining room displays a medieval feast, painted in 1994-95. A few years later, a resident decided to stick a gummi bear to it. Now, the chewy ursine candies cover the king’s robe, the queen’s ornaments, the turkey, the wine bottle, and so on in a color-coordinated but somewhat grotesque bas-relief. And a rumor has sprung up: “Supposedly they were all stuck by saliva,” says resident assistant Meghan O’Connor, ’02. “They haven’t molded yet, which says something about gummi bears.”
Then there’s a curious mural in the Terra game room that depicts two yams-turned-mice in a sort of tuber-inspired yin and yang. When past residents turn up, they invariably inquire about the “yamsters,” says RA David Garfield, ’03. What do today’s Terrans know about them? “Nothing. Not a thing,” he says. “We think they’re hideous and we know we’re not supposed to cover them up, but we can’t say why.”
Casa Zapata, on the other hand, knows exactly what its murals are about and where they came from. A plaque with the title, artist’s name and date accompanies almost every painting, and two residence staff members regularly provide mural tours to high school students.
Casa Zapata’s murals—which blanket several interior and exterior walls—address topics as diverse as indigenous creation myths, the founding of Mexico, Latina empowerment, Central American warfare and 1970s-era stereotypes of Chicanos. The murals were the brainchild of former resident fellow Tony Burciaga, who designed many of them and encouraged students to contribute through a course he taught on muralism. Others were painted by artists such as Ray Patlán, Juana Alicia and Zarco Guerrero, often with student assistance.
“Students feel a real cultural tie to these murals,” says Sarita Ocon, ’04, stressing that the mural is a significant Latino art form. “We really appreciate having them here on campus.” She and a group of dormmates are planning another, which will depict “issues surrounding September 11 and where Latinos are today.”
Jared Cohen’s works are also murals with a message. A self-described Africa-lover, he’s covered his room on the lower level of the Theta Delta Chi house with masks, fabric, beads and statues from his eight trips to the continent (puzzlingly, he’s an American history major). In the hall outside, on the dark, paneled, “gross” walls, are two canvases of stylized, angular people. The paintings “critique the way we look at African culture,” explains Cohen, ’04, pointing out stereotypes he’s incorporated, such as tribal drumming, nudity, stretched necks and earlobes, big lips and grass skirts. “People have to look at it for a while,” he acknowledges. “The first thing they see is the colors.”
Down the hall on an easel is No. 3 in the series: an in-progress mural of the 1994 Mugonero Massacre in Rwanda, a militia attack that killed an estimated 5,000 people. Cohen plans to complete 10 paintings, then hold a gallery show. Meanwhile, he says, “I guess I’m kind of using hallways as a gallery.”
No one would ever accuse Terra of gallery pretensions. It doesn’t have a theme or themes, just a hodgepodge of murals painted over a couple of decades. In addition to the yamsters, there’s a red, white and blue “Spirit of ’76” mural (possibly painted in 1990), an otter advertising “fine food and spirits” and cautioning, “You otter be 21 to drink here,” and Celtic knotwork framing a window.
Over a dinner of—believe it or not—yams, Terra resident Lexi Suppes explains what she likes and doesn’t like about living with murals. “It provides an interesting interaction with art,” she says, noting that she lived in Terra for two years before she realized there were faces in the tree on the dining room wall. On the other hand, says Suppes, ’02, “some of [the murals] are not as choice as others.” She flips through Terra’s spiral-bound collection of mural photos, pausing at a unicorn on a deep purple background. The real version is upstairs, covering an entire bedroom wall. “Imagine waking up to that every day,” she says.
After dinner, there’s one last mural to visit. I find the resident of room 208, electrical engineering graduate student Ben Serebrin, and ask whether his walls are sponge-painted terra-cotta. “Terra-cotta? Yuck,” he says. No one else seems to remember the sponge-painting either, so perhaps it has been gone for several years. “I’ve got a poster up, and it’s got pictures of garlic,” Serebrin offers. Good trade.
