by Dickinson students and Joelle Dietrick
As you continue along the sidewalk adjacent to the Goodyear Gallery, take a moment to peruse the large colorful mural that spans the exterior wall of the building. This is called The Goodyear Project Wall, and is dedicated to large-scale public art projects that are collaborative in nature. To create a work, artists are invited to Dickinson to help studio art majors and members of the Arts Collective paint a mural on the wall behind the Goodyear building. Each visiting artist works with around a dozen students to design the mural, prepare and paint the wall and record the process.
The current mural design was led by North Carolina-based artist Joelle Dietrick who grew up 25 miles from Three Mile Island, the power plant that is the site of the most large-scale U.S. nuclear disaster in history. She returned to the area to paint this mural on the Dickinson College Goodyear Project Wall from Sept. 28 – Oct. 3, 2021. The mural includes an extinct plant from Pennsylvania (Elodea schweinitzii Casp. / Schweinitz’s waterweed) and a net-positive house in the same time zone (Chapel Hill, North Carolina) by Arielle Condoret Schecher. The concentric circles in the composition are a reference to Dietrick’s young daughter’s reaction to her three-country Fulbright to Germany, Chile and Hong Kong: never a great sleeper and slowly processing the idea of time zones, her daughter asked “if I were to travel at the same rate as the sun, would I ever need to sleep?”
The question stuck with Dietrick, evoking thoughts about our innate curiosity about the world, the internet’s escalation of that wonder, and its cultivation of excessive longing for other places.
Now, follow the sidewalk along the mural (running along the back of the Goodyear building) until you see the gate opening.