TIME LAPSE VIDEOS: Watch 2 murals get created

Three beautiful murals have been installed in common areas around Emerson over the past few months, creating inspirational spaces for creative artists.

“By painting the walls,” said Robert Sabal, interim dean of the School of the Arts, “we seek to foster dynamic spaces that immediately put students, faculty, and staff in the same room as the work of other artists.”

“Rock Wall for Sedimentary Drawing” is a mural by Annie Blazejack on the Paramount Center’s fifth floor.

“A Coney Island of the Mind—Marshall McLuhan” is a mural by Julia Cseko at the Boylston Place entrance of the Walker Building. This mural includes quotes from Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian philosopher of communication theory.

In Common Ground, the lobby of the 10th floor of the Walker Building, a mural designed by artist Josue Rojas was created with the help of about 30 Emerson staff, faculty, students, and Boston community members over the summer, including volunteers from the Bird Street after-school program. The mural was created as a way to promote community-building and collaboration.

The mural on the 10th floor of the Walker Building that was created over the summer. 

A contest to name the Common Ground mural is wrapping up, and the name will be announced during a reception on Thursday, October 16, at 4:00 pm, at the mural.

Josue Rojas, the artist who created the mural on the 10th floor of Walker with help from 30 Emerson and Boston community members.

Read more detailed descriptions of the artwork below.

“Rock Wall for Sedimentary Drawing” by artist Annie Blazejack depicts the undulating layers of sedimentary rocks you might see along an interstate highway. Located on the fifth floor of the Paramount Center, the mural faces an academic and creative highway of its own: an atrium of classrooms, studios, rehearsal spaces, and faculty offices.

By leaving facets of the rock unpainted, Blazejack hopes passerby add their own drawings or writing.

“I hope all these pristine little rectangles get messy,” she said, adding that the wall should be a place “where you can leave a mark and add something to the history of Emerson.”

“A Coney Island of the Mind—Marshall McLuhan” by artist Julia Cseko, located at the Boylston Place entrance to the Walker Building, depicts aphorisms from the work of Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian philosopher regarded by many as the father of communication and media studies. Perhaps best known for coining the phrase “the medium is the message,” McLuhan shared several Emerson connections: His mother, Elsie Naomi McLuhan, worked at Emerson early in the College’s history. And Visual and Media Arts Professor Thomas Cooper served as McLuhan’s assistant in the 1970s.

Cseko’s mural is one of several in her “Coney Island of the Mind” series, which has depicted words of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, and Joao Cabral de Melo Neto on other murals in both Massachusetts and Brazil.

The artists were selected by a faculty and staff committee, in collaboration with the ProArts Consortium.