Art Alfresco

An art history class creates an informative walking tour of Dartmouth's campus statuary.

LAST SUMMER STUDENTS IN ANGELA ROSENTHAL'S ART HISTORY 16 CLASS STUDIED sculpture throughout history. Their most interesting project involved learning more about pieces they encountered daily around campus. Each student became an expert on one of nine sculptures at Dartmouth and created an informative walking tour as part of last year's Summer Arts Festival. Here are excerpts about each piece.

1. Untitled (1990)

At the Wheelock Street entrance to the Hood Museum, Joel Shapiros sculpture is an abstract form resembling a dancer. Its grace—4,000 pounds of wooden beams and bronze bent at 45-degree angles—seems to defy gravity.

2. X-Delta (1970)

Mark di Suvero's sculpture, found behind the Hood Museum, features beams in the shape of an X and an upside down triangle and includes a swing—allowing viewers to climb or rest upon it. The sculpture was located in front of Sanborn until July 1984, when students and faculty complained it was ugly.

3. Two Plate Prop (1976)

Richard Serra's aptly named work in the Darling Courtyard of the Hopkins Center includes two 4-by-4-feet steel plates resting on each other perpendicularly. As the time of day and season changes, new geometrical relationships can be viewed in the shadows created by the plates.

4. Fountain Figure (1963)

At the center of a fountain in the Hopkins Centers Zahm Courtyard stands Thomas Bayliss Huxley-Jones' tribute to Dartmouth students who fought and died in World War II. Huxley-Jones is also the sculptor of the Hops Warner Bentley bust, whose nose continues to be rubbed by many for good luck.

5. Inukshuk (2007)

Peter Imiq's composition, perched in front of McNutt Hall, is built from New Hampshire slate and granite rocks and is meant to mirror the human form. In Inuit culture, Inukshuks are used as navigational aids, marking the best routes for travelers to follow.

6. Peaceful Serenity (1992)

Outside Sherman House, home to the Colleges Native American studies program, stand three steel figures representing a mother, daughter and newborn infant. The abstract forms constructed by Allan Houser from bronze-plated steel stand on a bronze island surrounded by gravel.

7. Thel (1977)

Stretching across 135 feet of Wheeler lawn, Beverly Peppers work consists of five white, steel pyramidal forms of varying height. Former director of galleries Jan van der Marck compared Thel to a whale rising from the oceans depths. Joan Mondale, wife of the U.S. vice president, dedicated the sculpture in 1978.

8. D2D (1975)

Charles O. Perry's 10-foot bronze version of a Mobius strip—a figure on which one can trace a path touching every side without crossing over an edge—adorns the entrance to Fairchild Physical Sciences Center. Rowdy Brown alumni visiting campus inflicted nearly $20,000 in damages to the sculpture after a Dartmouth-Brown football game in November 1981.

9. Robert Frost (1996)

Nestled in the woods on the eastern edge of campus, a pensive depiction of the writer by George Lundeen sits on a boulder near the Lone Pine stump, pondering the beauty of the natural world.

KAREN IORIO is a DAM intern. The student researchers are Zinnia Amaya 'op, Worthy Dye '11, Stephenie Lee '11, Nadine Moezinia '11, Cynthia MoralesBejarano '11, Kyle Nicholas '11, Otega Ogban '11, TosinOgunbamise '11 and Henry I. Stewart '12.