Brightly colored images of Donald Duck, Zorro and Little Lulu and Tubby may not be what students expect to see printed on a wall in Perkins Library, or for that matter, anywhere on Duke’s campus. Bill Fick, a visiting assistant professor of the practice of Visual Arts, seeks to help change this perception with his new, dynamic mural of comic book characters in the hallway leading to the Gothic Reading Room.
Funded by the Collaboration Development Grant from the Duke Council for the Arts, the untitled mural consists of images of heads, figures, words and flowers that Fick used from comic books in the Edwin and Terry Murray Comic Book Collection in the Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Fick then used vertical silkscreen printing to repeatedly print the same images on the wall, resulting in a Warhol-esque conglomeration of pop culture images, rotated and overlapped in an organic, unconstrained pattern.
“Screen printing isn’t usually applied directly onto walls or other spaces that are so open to the public, but the method shows that art can be spontaneous,” Fick said. “For the piece in the library, I didn’t really have too much of a plan, except to make something very lively and colorful using images that have some impact.”
The overarching goal of the grant and Fick’s project was to bring Dutch artist Stefan Hoffmann to Duke in February to share his vertical screen printing methods with Fick, as well as a digital printmaking class taught by associate professor Merrill Shatzman, Fick said. The grant also provided him with funding to create the mural, which he will use as a teaching tool for the Art of the Comic Book and Zines class he teaches in the spring.
“This is an ideal project for the grant from my standpoint,” said Vice Provost for the Arts Scott Lindroth. “It brings a new kind of art to campus, it will enlarge Bill’s own scope as an artist and it will bring new things into the classroom.”
For Fick, the mural was not only an opportunity to link Hoffman’s methods with his Comic Book and Zines class, but also to expand his own research on public art, which he says ranges from murals to t-shirts to posters, or anything else that can be disseminated outside of traditional gallery spaces.
“Some people might not consider that art, but I think that’s changing,” he said. “There’s no longer this barrier between the artists who make art for museums and galleries and the ‘hero’ artists. Now it’s totally wide open.”
Fick’s mural is the second to grace the walls outside the Gothic Reading Room recently, following a collaborative student mural led by 2011 Duke graduate Bibi Tran, former chair of the Duke University Union Visual Arts Committee, which was completed last year.
“We want the library to be a space that is interactive and allows every kind of conversation, a place where students and faculty feel they are a part of the space and can express their work in many different ways,” Margaret Brown, exhibits coordinator and special collections conservator for Duke University Libraries, wrote in an email.
Lindroth agreed that public art has a tendency to foster community and creativity, something he hopes to see more often at Duke in the future.
“The arts are sometimes seen as being a little bit exclusive and inaccessible for the general public,” he said. “I think murals are a great example of a kind of art that is meant to be shared widely and enjoyed widely.”
Fick’s next project is a strip mural of student works and images taken from Duke Archives, which will be printed onto a 21 by three foot canvas and installed in the Bryan Center later this month. The design, Fick says, will stretch along a strip of wall from the plaza entrance to the main entrance from the traffic circle, bringing color, energy and dynamic design into the Bryan Center.
“Work in public spaces seems to be something people are interested in doing more of,” Fick said. “It can liven up a space, add meaning if it reflects where it’s being put, and have an educational, decorative or political component. It’s a way of enriching and drawing attention to a space, and it’s something Duke could use more of.”
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