PICASSO and the Birth of a Mural-Making Initiative at Princeton
/By Kisara Moore '22
Undergraduates and graduate students Working on Picasso’s Eco-Lounge Mural
The traditional arts are dying. Atelier-style oil painting and charcoal sketching, which I studied as a child and which formed the foundation of Western art many centuries ago, now seem to be endangered species. Young people just don’t seem interested in fine arts anymore.
Or so I had thought until my arrival at Princeton in 2018. Initially, the student community seemed to validate my pessimism. During my freshman orientation, I was inundated with hundreds of invitations to join a cappella groups and theater troupes, but I could not find a single visual arts organization, even in the student group directory. As it turns out, I wasn’t alone in my disappointment. In fact, the number of students who shared my interest in visual arts surprised me. When I circulated a survey asking respondents if they’d be interested in joining a club that would address the university's lack of visual arts extracurriculars, I received 150 responses within the first 24 hours.
“And Still I Rise,” A Collaborative letter art project expressing PICASSO’s solidarity with BLM
The enthusiastic responses I received from so many other students led me to seriously consider starting a student group that would fill this void. At the same time, I knew that I’d have to tread carefully, as I’d heard horror stories about similar initiatives fizzling out in the past. To learn more about these past attempts, I conducted a series of interviews with faculty and administrators who had overseen them. I discovered that previous art circles had mostly functioned as studio hangouts, where members would produce art casually and independently in a shared space. None of these projects emphasized collaboration or a sense of solidarity towards a collective goal, staples of community identity that had allowed so many performing arts groups to thrive on campus.
But what kinds of community-building projects exist in the visual arts realm? As I pondered this on my way out of Small World near campus, I noticed the “Journey” mural nearby, and the answer hit me like a stone wall: I could start a group dedicated to mural-making. The more I observed the town of Princeton’s vibrant collection of wall paintings, the more my confidence grew that mural-making would make the perfect medium for fostering a visual arts community on campus.
That spring, I threw myself into the formation of a student group I decided to name the Princeton Inter-Communal Arts Students Service Organization, or PICASSO for short. PICASSO would be the first of its kind in both spearheading communal art projects on campus and partnering with nonprofits in the tri-state area that focus on mural-making as a form of public service. Of course, Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither was PICASSO. It took over six months to gain official University recognition, and in the process, I reached out to over 35 organizational representatives to build a network of relevant contacts, including University administrators, leaders of art institutions, and distinguished muralists. It often took multiple emails, phone calls, and meetings to get the attention of a potential sponsor or partner organization.
A Promptcasso Mosaic
Now, with 330 members, seven officers, and three murals in the works, PICASSO is hopefully here to stay. Although we had fewer than five meetings on campus before the COVID-19 pandemic, the online environment forced us to grow, reflect, and be resourceful in ways we might not have otherwise. After all, who said “murals” are confined to physical walls? In April 2020, we decided to adapt the concept to an all-virtual setting with several community mosaics. One of our most popular ones was part of a weekly art challenge called Promptcasso—a portmanteau of “prompt” and “PICASSO.” Students submitted artwork following weekly prompts, ranging thematically from scenes in daily life to socially activist messages. Even after five months, participants continued to submit artwork each week and critique each other’s pieces in a lively group chat of 80 people, making it easy to forget how little time we had shared in-person before the pandemic.
the Sustainability mural design, which merges OUR 2020 Earth Day Art Contest’s winning designs
The seeds for our focal project this semester were planted as far back as February 2020, when the Office of Sustainability (OOS) reached out to me about joining forces on a sustainability-themed mural for the new Eco-lounge in Frist. I enthusiastically agreed to have PICASSO partner with OOS, and we decided to launch an Earth Day art contest that spring, with the winning submissions merged to form the mural’s design. They addressed the following prompt: “What does climate action look like at Princeton University, and what do we hope to accomplish in the next 50 years?” We ultimately incorporated designs from Audrey Yan, (’22) Anagha Rajagopalan (’24), Emma Mohrmann (’24), and Sunita Srivatsan (’21).
We had planned to begin painting the mural during Earth Month (April), but after COVID-19 struck, we were forced to delay the project until fall 2021. But the wait was well worth it, given the turnout we’ve seen from students of all artistic backgrounds, from first-time painters to seasoned muralists in PICASSO.
PICASSO members drawing out the grid in pencil
In mid-September, we finally dived into the process of creating the mural. We got the ball rolling by inviting PICASSO members to lay out the design at the mural’s designated location, a 10-by-10 foot space on a blank Eco-lounge wall. This outline took two weeks, with four sessions of two to three hours each and about 20 participants. To streamline the process, we used a grid, and followed one student’s suggestion that we use a projector to transfer the design onto the wall. We used pencil to draw everything, but once the outline was complete, we traced over everything in acrylic paint marker. We then set up a paint-by-numbers system so that students without any prior artistic experience could also participate in painting: we assigned each section a number from 1 to 15 according to the 15 different colors of acrylic paint the Office of Sustainability ordered for this project.
OUR Completed outline in acrylic paint marker, with each section numbered in pencil
Since late September, we’ve kicked off the long-awaited painting of the mural. All university members are invited to participate, and roughly 70 undergraduates, graduate students, and staff have joined us in painting the mural so far. We’ve run four painting sessions of two to three hours each over the course of two weeks, and during the week after Fall Break, we will run a few more sessions to wrap up the project.
PICASSO members tracing the projected design with acrylic paint markers
Undergraduates and graduate students painting the mural over a two-week period
We still have quite a bit of touch-up work to do, but I couldn’t be more pleased with our progress so far. The colors are much more vibrant than anticipated, and we’ve found it rewarding to tweak the design in ways that better adapt it to the color and texture of the wall. Perhaps the most noticeable difference between the original design and the final product is that we’ve decided to make the background white (we’ll be painting it snow white, so that it’s even brighter than currently pictured) to make the mural pop out more against the wall. We’re using the original design’s light teal background in the tigers’ outlines instead (as can be seen in the last photo) to complement their orange coats.
Our most recent progress—we plan on finishing the week after fall break!
I believe that this is part of the beauty of mural-making: when a physical wall is your canvas, it presents a unique circumstance for you to redefine your approach to your original hand-drawn or digital design.
I hope to share updates once we finish this mural and make progress on our other projects!