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FEATURE
ART AND CAMPUS A HISTORICAL LOOK AT STUDENT INTERACTIONS WITH KU'S PUBLIC ART
BY | JON HERMES
"Public art helps people to understand the collective humanity that we share." Ted Johnson, former Professor Emeritus of French and Italian and guide of a stop day walking tour that examines the monuments on campus, says. "Each work of art on campus is fascinating because it represents the idea of the knowledge that has accumulated over thousands of years of human history."
Walking across the University of Kansas's campus is like taking a step back in time. The public art on campus tells the story of each generation that has walked across Mount Oread. "Public art, in the context of campus, challenges us," Saralyn Reece Hardy, Director of Spencer Museum of Art, says. "It interrupts our days in a good way. It's always there to visit and interact with. We interact with these works every day, sometimes without even thinking about it." These are the stories behind a few monuments we walk by every day.
On a leisurely walk through campus, two students stop to look at the grotesques lining the façade of Dyche Hall, home to the Natural History Museum. The year was 1913 and Mount Oread only had a few buildings lining what would eventually become Jayhawk Blvd. Dyche Hall, which had only been completed a decade earlier, overlooked the endless Kansas landscape. One of the girls turned to her friend and asked what the statues on the building were. Legend has it that her friend, Helen Rhoda Hoopes, replied, "Oh, they are something like a sore throat, but I forget just what." Hoopes later became a popular professor at KU, a published Kansas poet, and the first woman editor for The University Daily Kansan.
"It's interesting that people always establish different conclusions to the meanings of the grotesques," Ted Johnson says. "Some like them, some don't. Each grotesque involved a lot of thought. They are Chimera, a combination of several different animals."
Joseph Robaldo Frazee and his son Vitruvius, Italian stone carvers who lived in Lawrence at the turn of the century, carved twelve grotesques between 1901 and 1902. Grotesques, unlike gargoyles, which were used as gothic drainage systems on buildings, serve only aesthetic purposes. The twelve grotesques were placed on the building, four on each side. These statues watched over campus until 1962 when four were removed to make way for a new wing of Dyche Hall.
During Spring of 1902, two KU students, Antonio Tommasini and Fred Pickett, frequently stopped by Fowler shops, where the Frazees were carving the grotesques. Enamored by the carving process, Tommasini and Pickett were allowed to work in the shop dressing tools and watch the grotesques take shape. Joseph Robaldo Frazze even allowed the two students, under his supervision, to help carve one of the grotesques, an early representation of the Jayhawk, with Pickett carving one half and Tommasini finishing the rest.
Tommasini describes the process in a letter dated March 14, 1941, to Walter Salathiel, a former classmate of Tommasini's;
"No models were used for the figures a stone was set up on a block, a few (to me) meaningless marks were made on it and then the mallet and chisel in Mr. Frazee's hands started at the top and worked down, to free the figure from its encasing stone."
The University's chant, which became the official school yell in 1873, is carved into three of the grotesques. This was the first time a school's chant had been immortalized in sculpture. If you look closely you can see "Rock Chalk" on the breast of a grotesque on the Southwest side of the building with an engraving of 1873 below it, which marks the first graduating class at KU. "JHawk?" is engraved in the breast of a grotesque but the question mark remains a mystery. "Any other school that carves their yell will not be as venerable as ours," Johnson says.
Historical photos courtesy of the Spencer Research Library Way back when: The statue of James Wood Green and a student was the subject of pranks and the center of rivalry between the law and engineering schools. It still stands by Lippincott Hall.
A grotesque image: Between 1901 and 1902, Joseph Robaldo Frazee and his son carved twelve "grotesques" that were placed along each side of Dyche Hall. They were moved in 1962, and some are still present today, sitting above the entryway to the building.
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