The graffiti that adorns the basement walls of Quinby House isn't the only art that partygoers will encounter this year.
The "European Portrait Gallery", designed by students Sara Griffin '09 and Cami Osorno '10, is an eye-catching piece of public art that now decorates the basement stairwell in the social house. It is a result of several months of collaboration with Associate Professor of Art Mark Wethli and his spring 2008 public art class.
"The whole class gets credit for making this happen," Osorno said.
"Without Mark Wethli and [Visual Arts Technician] Kyle Downs this would not have happened," Griffin added. "We owe this to a lot of people."
Quinby House approached the class last spring about redesigning the space where the infamous "pee wall" is located. House members thought the stairwell, where many drunken students have relieved themselves during parties, needed a new purpose.
"They had tried to do things with the space but what they tried didn't accomplish what they were looking for," Osorno said.
Several students in the class submitted proposals for the space but Osorno and Griffin's was chosen.
"Initially, I wanted to play up the pee wall," Osorno said. "But we grew tired of that idea because it didn't say enough."
Griffin and Osorno, along with Wethli and the rest of the public art class, created a portrait gallery with purple walls and gold wainscoting. The portrait prints in the gallery are elegant and formal.
However, the gallery does have some humorous references to peeing that link it to the wall. Although gold and purple are both regal colors, lavender essential oils are thought to stimulate urine production and ancient alchemists believed that gold could be extracted from urine, according to Griffin and Osorno.
"It's meant to be over-the-top elegance," Griffin said.
The result is a work of art that doesn't directly reference the wall but confronts students about how they behave in certain settings, according to Osorno.
The juxtaposition between the ostentatious gallery and the heavily graffitied walls of the main part of Quinby's basement highlights the stark contrast between the way students act at social parties compared to how they normally represent themselves.
"Creating a formal portrait gallery raises the question of how you behave in the basement of your social house compared to how you would behave in a space like an art museum," Osorno said. "People love their social houses but they don't always treat them with the same respect they would if they were sober."
To emphasize this discrepancy Griffin and Osorno installed a mirror after the last portrait in the room.
"The people in the paintings were projecting an image of who they wanted others to think they were," Griffin said. "When people look at themselves in the mirror, they'll see the image they project of themselves in a College House basement."
Griffin hopes that the images of "students at their worst" will make them question the decisions they're making.
"As someone who's lived in a social house and as a woman on campus who has changed and grown since I lived in one, it's important for me that this room, maybe not overtly, but implicitly questions why students make the decisions we do," she said.
"Only time will tell if people really like this," Osorno said. "But hopefully it will make them think."