Thousands of U students will graduate in fewer than five weeks and participate in grand ceremonies celebrating their achievements.
But when the pomp and circumstance fade away and the Huntsman Center and auditoriums clear out, there’s not much left on campus to mark that those people once studied, worked and hung out around the U. Four freshman students are working to change this lack of physical evidence with “We Were Here,” a mural by the ASUU offices in the Union covered with the handprints of U students and faculty.
The mural currently has around 50 multicolored handprints on it from different members of the U’s community. Julia Burraston, an undeclared freshman who came up with the idea for this installation, said she hopes to have another day this semester to get more people to leave their mark, and that it will happen again next spring, hopefully spawning a new U tradition.
Burraston came up with the idea for this project as the final for her art history LEAP class, a year-long seminar for freshmen where students are in small courses with the same classmates and teacher.
On one of the first days of class in the fall, her professor, Erin Silva, spoke of “La Cueva de Las Manos” or the “Cave of Hands” site in Southern Argentina, where hundreds of stenciled outlines of hands cover the walls. During this lecture, he told the class this was a way for these people to say that they were there and had existed. Burraston said she felt the idea of physically showing one’s existence would translate well to campus.
“My dad went to school here and he’ll talk about all the different things that he’d done and how much fun that he had but there was never anything that he left behind. That was in the back of my mind the whole time I was planning this,” Burraston said. “When you come back to school after you’ve graduated … you can say I spent time here and did this and oh, here’s my handprint. Even if you can’t really see where your fingerprints are, if you find your handprint you can look back on it years and years from now and be like, I was here, I mattered, I was part of something bigger.”
Burraston announced her project to the class and had a few people join her while the rest did individual finals. Although two of the group members dropped out, four students including Marissa Sittler, Conner Kinkade Darling, Natalie Parkin and Burraston remained. Their professor and Sam Clayton, their peer advisor, were both very excited about the project and encouraged them to continue with it.
Darling, a freshman in ceramic arts and business entrepreneurship, was one of the first people to join the project. He said he joined because he thought it would be a great way to meet new friends and loves how it has bloomed into a much larger legacy project.
“We were part of the university and by doing this project we weren’t the regular run-through university student,” Darling said. “We actually wanted to be a part of this university and be influential enough that we can maybe inspire others to do projects similar to this and help entice students to do more than just get through school or just get through their education and actually be part of this university and involve themselves.”
Parkin, another member of the group, was in charge of organizing where the mural would go. Burraston said they wanted the mural to be in the Union because of how many students pass through it daily. Fortunately for her group, ASUU made way for the mural in the hall by their office by removing some unused bulletin boards.
In the LEAP class, most of the work is collaborative, including the tests, so Burraston said this final felt like an extension of what she had already been doing the whole year.
“It’s so interesting when you have so many people from so many backgrounds and majors,” Burraston said. “Everyone just has so many diverse ideas to put forward, that even if it’s not what you’re going for, it’s so interesting to hear their ideas and what they want to see happen with the project.”
@Ehmannky