Award-winning program commissioned for mural

Following last fall's successful mounting of a 12-by-40-foot outdoor mural on Detroit's Grand River Avenue by non-art majors in the Lloyd Hall Scholars Program, Mark Tucker and his winter term students are poised to create yet another mural.

This one, based on the 2006 evolution theme semester, will be installed permanently in a two-story atrium of the newly built Undergraduate Science Building, where the work will be visible from the outside.

Tucker, arts coordinator for the program, welcomes non-art major students who have not had previous art experience to his three-credit course.

"I do expect them to possess an excellent work ethic as well as the ability to grasp aesthetic principles quickly and apply them in a physically demanding, team-oriented, public environment," Tucker says.

Tucker's course explores the collaborative creation of art in public settings through building and painting a stage set for an Ann Arbor non-profit theater production of "Fiddler on the Roof."

"This will be a full hands-on experience which will encourage collaborative working relationships, while exploring techniques and tools used for making large-scale theatrical scenery," Tucker says.

During the remainder of the course, students will be introduced to basic design, color theory and reproduction techniques that will be applied directly to the individual and collaborative design and creation of the mural.

Tucker and his students have gained prominence in local and regional art circles with their murals. In 2004, the Ann Arbor Commission on Art for Public Places awarded the Lloyd Hall Scholars Program its annual Golden Paintbrush Award for an 8-by-32-foot outdoor mural created in one of the city's prime retail areas.

Through Tucker's class, students gain experience producing mixed media arts projects and analyzing and critiquing works of art and questioning their assumptions about what they see and read.

"I'd like my students to be able to combine seeing with thinking to be able to act, to create, to take risks and to finally discover something inside themselves that they had never seen before," Tucker says.

The "Evolution" mural is supported by LSA, the Lloyd Hall Scholars Program, U-M Housing, the Exhibit Museum of Natural History and Arts at Michigan.

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