The Lang Mural Project has just completed a splendid mural inside 65 Fifth Avenue, the converted department store which has for several decades served as the heart of the graduate faculty. (It's on the ground floor, which is 2 stories high, so you get an idea of scale.) They were given permission to do it because the building's slated for demolition, to make way for the visionary new glass-clad "vertical campus" "signature building" on which all our hopes are supposed to be pinned. The razing of 65 has been postponed, so the mural will have a longer life than expected!The mural is based on a mural Diego Rivera designed for Rockefeller Center 75 years ago called "Man at the crossroads, looking with hope and high vision to the choosing of a new and better future" - a mural never
completed because of it positive depiction of communists (yes, that's Lenin). The Lang students studied the history of the Mexican mural movement, and updated Rivera's planned painting. Where Lenin was are now portraits of supporters of the Lang Mural Project, and some long-term employees of the university.The official unveiling of the mural yesterday was a magical event - one felt the power of a mural to reach out and change the world. After students described their process, someone read a letter of congratulation from the daughter of Diego Rivera in Mexico. Everyone beamed. Then, a Mexican dance teacher who just happened to be walking by started enthusing about it, how the Mexican embassy would want to know about it, and promised to bring word and images of it to various organizations he would soon be visiting in Mexico City. Wow!
Maybe the energy of this hopeful mural, rooted in the past and attentive to questions of social justice in our own time but looking brightly forward, can help keep our crazy university on course!
