This article was first published in BU Today on June 2, 2022. By Sophie Yarin | Photos by Ziyu (Julian) Zhu (CGS’23)
Excerpt
Installing a mural on an urban campus like Boston University’s is essentially creating public art, visible to anyone at any time, from neighbors to residents to tourists. It cannot be undertaken lightly, and nobody knows this better than Ty Furman.
One of Furman’s duties as managing director of the BU Arts Initiative is to “shepherd public art proposals through the approval process,” which, he has learned, is extensive and can sometimes take years from start to finish.
“We get projects on a semi-regular basis,” he says. “I get to know the student artists pretty well.”
The two newest campus murals—one installed at the Joan & Edgar Booth Theatre and the other on the front facade of the Kenmore Classroom Building—first came to his attention in fall 2020. The proposals, Furman says, had more in common than timing: each was submitted by a separate team of two graduating seniors, each focused on sustainability and the environment, and each was around two years in the planning stages before finally being installed within weeks of each other this spring.
Furman “was like, ‘It’s so wild that you guys have come to me, because I’ve had more students ask to do murals now than I’ve had in the past,’” says Keeley Bombard (CAS’22, GRS’22), a member of one of the teams. “So I think there was just something in the air.”
In spring 2020, Bombard, who was president of the Environmental Student Organization (ESO), and ESO member Halle Cooper (CAS’22) conceived of a mural as a semester-long ESO project.
“It fell into place very quickly, and then subsequently…very slowly throughout the pandemic,” Cooper says.
After the COVD-19 pandemic forced their original plan off course, Bombard, who graduated in May with a dual degree in environmental analysis and policy and energy and environment, and Cooper, whose degree is in environmental science, first met with Furman the following fall.