Public Art Project

Jamie Kostecki, Kathryn Graham, and Katie Zeiger

Blue's Buried Treasures:

Public artwork provides an excuse for people to visit the site in which it’s displayed. It would only make sense to integrate public art into a college campus in order to motivate and draw people onto campus. That’s exactly what we’re attempting to accomplish with our five installations of artwork on Butler University’s campus that are site specific, useful, and entertaining. We call our project Blue’s Buried Treasures, and it consists of five partially buried objects that serve specific purposes and are quite large in size; we drew inspiration from Claes Oldenburg’s buried bicycle. The pieces include a rubber paw print, a graduation cap, a pencil, a bone, and a basketball. Each artwork is accompanied by a sign that contains a clue guiding the participant in a bit of a scavenger hunt around campus meant to show off some of its important sites.

The hunt begins with a giant paw print with a ten-foot diameter on the main Mall. We understand and acknowledge that many students utilize the Mall to play various sports or to do homework, so we envision the paw print being on the grassy area in front of the BU sign and behind the concrete Butler University sign. This ensures that it will not interfere with the many activities that the Mall plays host to, and it will even add to them. The paw print will be made up of the rubber material that many playgrounds utilize. The material looks like tiny cubes of blue rubber, but they’re all stuck together to provide a surface with great traction and durability. We figured that the Mall would be a great, central starting point for the “tour” of campus.

The sign on the Mall next to the paw print then leads partakers to the giant graduation cap located at the back of Irwin Library near the ResCo parking lot. The cap would be about ten feet tall and would provide comfortable shade for anyone interested in cooling off. This particular structure would be made out of black fiberglass, to ensure

durability, and the tassel would consist of rope strong enough to support 300 pounds. The tassel would serve as a helping hand for anyone who would want to climb on the structure. We placed the graduation cap near the library because students obviously have to put in a lot of time and effort into their school work in order to graduate, and many Butler students choose to study at Irwin Library.

After the library, visitors are guided to the grassy area in between the Pharmacy Building and Lilly Hall where a ten-foot-long bench lies in the form of a pencil.

The utility of this structure is obvious enough, and it would be a foot-and-a-half tall to insure accessibility for children. We picture the bench to be made up out of painted teak wood. We thought it’s important that visitors to campus see the academic buildings as well, and the pencil bench would lead them right past all of the main academic buildings. We associated a pencil with homework and academics, so it was only natural that this particular area would serve as the home for this structure.

The next site would be the Holcomb Gardens: quite the vision in itself! We thought that a partially buried bone that doubles as a slide would be a fun addition to this already playful

area. The Holcomb Gardens attracts a lot of families, and we thought it would be an excellent idea to provide some entertainment for the younger visitors as well. The slide would consist of off-white colored plastic in order to resemble the appearance of a dog’s prized possession. This specific location for the bone also has comedic value in that dogs typically choose to bury a bone in a garden.

The last stop in our scavenger hunt tour is Hinkle Fieldhouse. Our basketball team’s NCAA journey was, and continues to be, a great accomplishment for a school our size; we feel that it’s important that something be created to remind everyone of Butler’s achievement.

An eight-foot-tall basketball made out of burnt orange colored plastic would lie in the grassy area between the HRC and Hinkle parking lot. Stairs in the back of the basketball would provide a fantastic scene for picture taking with Hinkle Fieldhouse in the background. Again, the relevance of the structure to its environment is self-explanatory.

Our public art would greatly add to Butler’s campus. It would attract families from surrounding neighborhoods and encourage them to enjoy our campus as much as we do. It would also serve as fun entertainment for prospective Butler students when they visit our campus. Perhaps it could help to seal the deal in their decision to attend Butler! Public art on campus promotes our Liberal Arts education—yet another one of Butler’s unique qualities. Each structure not only would look nice and add to our campus’s physical appeal, but they all have specific functions that they serve. From a bench, to a slide, to a photo-op promoter, every one has interactive qualities that appeal to a wide audience. Butler definitely could always use some more art, and our public art installation would be the perfect solution.