Working through the night, a group of design students used buckets of paint to cover the Free Expression Tunnel white, with the exception of an expanse of wall dedicated to a mural of Marvin Malecha, the dean of the College of Design.
Ryan Whitley, a freshman in architecture, led the event and bought all of the supplies.
“I was sitting in a boring studio critique brainstorming a new idea to do in the tunnel. Obviously, the dean is a big figure in design. At the beginning he was an icon for the design school and I wanted to incorporate an idea based off of that in the Free Expression Tunnel,” Whitley said. “After [the dean’s] class, this icon figure has grown bigger because I’ve learned so much from him. I’ve seen the work that he’s done and how he thinks about design which has changed my perspective on the way I think about creating my own personal designs.”
Whitley said the group grew from around 10 to more than 40 as the night wore on.
“You just don’t get many opportunities to get this many people to be a part of something that’s so big. We are all here for one reason and that is to hang out as a big crowd and as designers. In a sense we are all like one big family,” Whitley said.
Matt Hirsch, a freshman in architecture and co-leader of the group, said the dean’s face was inspired by Andy Warhol paintings.
“We knew that we were going to do multiple faces and it reminded us of Andy Warhol and his famous Marilyn Monroe paintings and so we decided to do our own version of an Andy Warhol painting but instead use the dean of design school’s face,” Hirsch said.
Alexander Backeris, a freshman in architecture, was the concept artist and process designer. Backeris found a picture of the dean on the website and not only came up with the Andy Warhol idea, but he also designed the stencils for it. There were multiple layers of stencil for each image.
Kevin DeHaven, a freshman in architecture, said he thinks people will not paint over the whiteness.
“I think it’s awesome and people will respect it so much that they won’t paint over it. This will most likely be the last thing ever painted in the Free Expression Tunnel,” DeHaven said.
The work of artistry was dubbed ”Designstein” by the participants, because they said the dean looks like Einstein.
Mikayla Craig contributed to this report.
