New SIUE Sculptures

by Duncan Skinner and Allison Baltz

While walking to and from class, we have noticed a few new sculptures being put up around campus. There’s a giant toilet, a ladder with a paint bucket, and a butterfly perched on a rock – all brand new and situated just outside the Morris University Center. They just started going up within the last month, and work is still being done on them. These are the first new sculptures we’ve seen go up in our time at SIUE, and we had a few questions about the new additions:

• Why did campus choose now to add new sculptures?
• Did COVID prevent new additions in our previous years here?
• How often are sculptures usually added to campus?
• Are there other new sculptures around that we haven’t seen?
• Who made these new sculptures?
• How long did it take to make the sculptures?
• How are new additions chosen?
• What do students think of the new sculptures?

To answer this, we plan to interview members of the art department, namely Thad Duhigg, listed as a professor in the sculpture branch of the art department. We also want to interview students involved in the making of these sculptures, as well as non-art students so we can get thoughts and opinions on these new pieces from the SIUE student body. We would use a video news story to cover this topic. While we were originally planning to do a podcast, we decided that using a visual medium would be perfect so that we could show our audience the new sculptures that we are covering in the story.