There is a new mural painted by ARTSwego at Oswego State in the Sundial Quad, lying between Mahar, Lanigan and Tyler Halls.

The mural consists of large wavy stripes of blue surrounding one large stripe of yellow. The mural was completed on Oct. 10.

“I think, similar to every student on this campus, I walk by [the quad] every day, and thought wow, it’s such an eyesore,” said Miranda Traudt,  Director of Arts Programming at ARTSwego. “All this concrete right, it’s chipping away, it doesn’t look very good. Wouldn’t it be great to do some public art piece on here? So, that’s where the idea got started.”

This inspiration led to the mural, where a bare concrete quad could become a colorful work of art.

ARTSwego reached out to graphic designer Damien Vallelonga and architect Brendan Rose from Echo Makes Inc. to assist on the project.

“Somewhere about a year later I knew I needed to hire professionals who do this and who knew what they were doing, and that’s when Damien and his team came into the picture,” Traudt said.

According to Vallelonga, the unique area around the Oswego State campus was incorporated into the mural’s design.

“It’s a waterscape, landscape of water,” Vallelonga said. “It’s meant to sort of show the depth of the water but draw in clear inspiration from the lake. It’s moving in that direction of drawing you towards the lake. And in a way … in a semi abstract way. If you look on Google Maps, you pan out way above Oswego, you can see those layers of the depth of the lake, so that informed the design a bit.”

The image in the mural represents the landscape of the lake, with each stripe of a different shade showing the different levels of the land.

“And then the yellow,” Traudt said. “A lot of students come from the dorms to the west and then walk east across campus to the academic buildings, so it was there to use a bright color to draw people into the mural and have them interact with it and be a part of it and walk through it.”

While the blue stripes represent the different levels of the landscape in the lake, the yellow stripe in the middle was discolored and brightened in order to draw students into the mural.

“It was directed by or inspired by the campus initiative,” said Vallelonga.

The mural being painted is part of a larger initiative, that being the “Fresh Water for All,” Grand Challenges project. The project was started to raise awareness about water consumption and decrease water use.

“It’s the campus wide grand challenge, fresh water for all, which is a whole campus initiative to get different departments and programs all excited about one idea and that is fresh water,” Traudt said.

According to Traudt, the Sundial will eventually become a grassy area instead of concrete, but the newly painted mural is just the start.

“The long term plan for this space is that it will be turned into a green space,” Traudt said. “But in the meantime, we wanted to use this mural to activate it. So depending on how long that takes, we potentially could need to touch it up, to maintain it if the colors start to fade or get worn out.”

“Some of the buildings look really bad,” Dominic Altamura, a freshman at Oswego State studying computer science, said. “But like if they have a nice little mural in the middle of the campus, it makes the campus overall look good.” 

For Altamura, the mural makes the campus look nicer.

“It dresses the place up,” he said. “Penfield library looks like something out of a dystopian future where society has fallen.”

When asked about whether or not there would be more murals in the future, Traudt responded, “Yes, I do. I’m excited and I think other people are excited, so if, there’s support and resources, yes absolutely I think there will be more.”

Photo by Charles Vaughn via iHeartOswego.com