Explore Art On Campus
CMU125th Anniversary Celebration
Now online: Campus tours featuring Public Art on the Bloomberg Connects App!
Public Art:
Enriching the CMU Experience
Public art is a vibrant and essential part of life at Carnegie Mellon University, actively enhancing our community's daily experience and reflecting our global leadership in the arts. It's more than a pleasing aesthetic; it broadens our educational mission and inspires fresh perspectives.
Our policies, including the foundational Simonds Commission Principle, ensure this commitment is central to our campus DNA. These policies establish that art is integral to our built environment, mandating that compelling new works be incorporated into all construction and major renovations. This deliberate integration ensures that our campus consistently evolves as a source of cultural vitality.
The Carnegie Mellon Public Art & Art Properties Collection is a dynamic resource of over 1,500 artworks, artifacts, and ephemera. We invite you to explore this collection and engage with art that tells powerful stories, sparks new ideas, and forges meaningful connections to communities and traditions from Pittsburgh and beyond.
Walk Through Time: CMU Public Art
Rosabel Rosalind's (CFA 2023) The Neighborhood Tapestries were created for the Margaret Morrison Street Neighborhood Commons. They illustrate the timeless acts of gathering, collaboration, and recreation.
Amanda Ross-Ho's Untitled Core Sample (THE FENCE) honors the CMU Fence, a century-old student tradition. Ross-Ho enlarged a core sample extracted from the Fence to create the sculpture, which resides at Forbes Beeler Apartments.
Guadalupe Maravilla's Descansa Espíritus/Spirits Rest, located in the Highmark Center for Health, Wellness and Athletics, features six polished aluminum hammocks suspended as a symmetrical mobile. Inspired by Central American tradition, the work invites ancestral spirits to rest.
In Wean Hall, Bella Alt's Four Birds, depicts four common Pittsburgh species—cardinal, heron, hummingbird, and robin—exploring connections between avian migration and students' journeys to CMU.
Angelica Bonilla (A.B.) Fominaya's (BCSA 2023) mural In The Footsteps of a Stranger, in Posner Hall, invites reflection on how viewers encounter unfamiliar spaces and people within global contexts of war, migration, and displacement.
Jessica Stockholder's Making Way sits inside and outside the new Alan Magee Scaife Hall, supported by its structure and landscape. It slips in and out of established forms, inviting us to imagine pathways within any system.
Thaddeus Mosley's Inverted Dancer is an 8 ½-foot bronze sculpture cast from reworked wood. The gravity-defying work is inspired by spontaneous jazz music and is now home at CMU's Fifth and Clyde House.
Stephanie Dinkins' Good Thoughts, Good Words, Good Deeds, in the lobby of TCS Hall, uses large dye prints on metal to show interconnected Venn diagrams. They signify the complexity of our relationship to influential systems—human, non-human, and machine.
Reliefs II, by Mark Baskinger and Jim Daniels (fabricated by Dee Briggs), is an extension and interpretation of Robert Lepper's Relief. This installation, in the Tepper Building Quad, comprises five thematic panels: ethics, synergy, empathy, discovery, and perseverance.
Faculty member Douglas Cooper (CFA 1970) and Stefani Danes, a married couple, created The Collaborative Campus, a mural outside Simmons Auditorium in the Tepper Building that explores how knowledge and community are built through collaboration.
Sherri Wolfgang's (CFA 1983) The Young Americans, part of her American Pathos series, captures the dark cloud of millennial doubt. Located on the lower level of the Cohon University Center, her painting brings attention to the uncertainty that persists, even amidst stability and satisfaction.
Terry Boyd's (MAM 2013, BFA 2009) Next Year You'll Wish You Started Today is an autobiographical installation in Hamburg Hall. It's 67.5 miles of embroidery depict 10 years of education, discovery, and personal growth at CMU.
Joyce Bowie Scott's (CFA 1965) Collage Innovations is a series of six works donated to CMU in 2016. The pieces, which include printed components from the School of Art, are displayed in Scott Hall.
Former faculty, Ron Bennett's Sophomore Faces resulted from his Introduction to Foundry class. Students cast their own faces using wax, plaster, and aluminum to learn technical casting aspects. More pieces were added to the installation annually and can now be found on the lower level of the Cohon University Center.
Jonathan Borofsky's (CFA 1964) Walking to the Sky was donated by Jill Gansman Kraus (CFA 1974) and her husband. The piece, located at the front of the university, affirms imagination, aspiration, and transformation—central to CMU's mission.
Sun Lu's Mao Yisheng sculpture, outside Porter Hall, honors CMU's first doctoral graduate. Yisheng, the father of modern bridge engineering, designed China's Qiantang and Wuhan Yangtze River Bridges.
Jill Gansman Kraus (CFA 1974) and Peter Kraus commissioned The Kraus Campo, created by artist Mel Bochner (CFA 1962) and landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh, as a unique gathering place atop the Posner Center roof. The space embodies CMU's multidisciplinary culture.
Gary Hume's sculpture from his Snowmen series, located near Doherty Hall, features the artist's characteristic use of pure forms and bright, simplified colors. The work was donated to CMU in 2004 by Milton and Sheila Fine.
Dale Chihuly's Frank-Ratchye End of the Day Chandelier honors CMU's eighth president, Jared L. Cohon. Located at the entrance of the University Center, its multitude of colors and shapes symbolize his sustained commitment to a diverse and welcoming CMU.
Carol Kumata's Curtains, on the facade of the Purnell Center for the Arts, is a series of bronze sculptures capturing stage curtains caught in the wind. Designed for the School of Drama, it nods to the theatrical purpose and Hornbostel's architectural details.
University Center Tiles, by former faculty member Joe Mannino, features hands cast from people who worked and studied at CMU, each cast featuring props requested by the individuals.
Erika Fairchild's University Center Ceramic Tiles, on the buildings facade, depict what the artist describes as "little people in the walls." The tiles explore themes of the four elements: earth, air, water, and fire.
Faculty member Douglas Cooper (CFA 1970) created University Center Murals outside the Rangos Ballroom. The printed mural depicts the CMU campus as it looked in 1996, pre-Purnell Center for the Arts.
Former faculty member Ron Bennett's Cloud Window, across the Cut near Doherty Hall, translates landscape forms recorded through aerial photography into sculpture. Bennett developed this aerial perspective after learning to fly.
Clark Winter's For the Love of Two Oranges is a vibrant, minimalist sculpture of four bold orange steel blocks. Installed in 1972 outside Wean Hall, the restored work has now found a home at Fifth Neville Apartments.
CMU holds 60 George Nakashima furniture pieces, commissioned for Warner Hall by Paul Planert and gifted by the Scaife family in 1965. Iconic designs, like the Conoid Bench, are still used in Warner Hall offices today.
Former faculty, Robert Lewis Lepper's 1951 marble Reliefs is a sandblasted industrial mural located at the entrance of the Hall of the Arts. The large bas-relief sculpture reflects Lepper's deep interest in industrial design, technology, and their impact on society.
The College of Fine Arts Niches are limestone carvings showcasing five architectural styles: Greek, Roman, Medieval, Renaissance, and non-Western. Begun in 1912, the project blends art, history, and innovation as part of Henry Hornbostel’s vision of the building as a “textbook of architecture.”
+ 1500
Art Objects
+ 1000
Artists
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Continents
Public art elevates and enriches the campus experience and helps define the creative spirit that students and faculty share across all the colleges.
Elizabeth Chodos
Johnson Family Public Art Curator, Carnegie Mellon University
