MSU faculty, students and visitors walking into the Union Station Cafeteria will be greeted by 13 faculty members who have been part of the university since 1855.
While the people will not be able to shake the visitors’ hands, they will be present in a 55-foot mural on the north wall of the cafeteria.
“These 13 individuals are some of the most influential faculty members since the beginning of the university,” said James Sheppard, director of the Union. “They are recognized as icons.”
The mural is the second of four parts in the Union Station Cafeteria enhancement project. The first features two display cases full of books that were written by MSU faculty and alumni.
The third and fourth parts, also on the walls of the cafeteria, will begin as soon as the mural is done. Four walls will feature framed pictures of 100 additional faculty members and two other walls will have murals of one tool used in each of MSU’s 90 academic departments.
Sheppard said there will be anything from a microscope to a tractor in the second mural.
“We wanted to take an artistic approach to the tools and implements that are found in teaching and research across the university,” he said.
Sheppard said the project ideas developed last April from a faculty committee trying to decide how it could use a special allocation of money that was given to the Union. He said the committee knew the cafeteria would be the perfect place to feature faculty member achievements.
“Ninety percent of the people who come to eat there are faculty and staff,” Sheppard said. “They have been coming there for decades and have a traditional pattern of meeting there.”
Scott Blanchard will be a visiting English professor in the summer and said he was taken to the Union cafeteria by other members of the English department. He said he comes to the university often to prepare for teaching and goes to the cafeteria for lunch.
“It has been really spectacular to see the mural take shape over the past few months,” he said. “Every time I come here there is even more done with even more detail and depth to the design.”
Blanchard, an MSU alumnus, said he recognizes the names of many of the faculty featured in the mural.
Many of the people, like Robert Kedzie, Linda Landon, A.J. Cook, William Butterfield and Beatrice Paolucci, have campus buildings named after them. William Beal, for whom the Beal Botanical Gardens are named for, will also appear in the mural.
Past faculty members I. Forest Huddleston, Russell Nye, Ralph Turner, Julian Samora, J. Sutherland Frame, Walter Adams and William Pipes round out the 13 people featured in the paintings.
Okemos resident Lori Lechler, the artist who is painting the mural, said she has been painting since she was a little kid.
Lechler has been researching the lives of the 13 people, who are all deceased, for a year and began painting March 1. She said she wants to make sure everything about the paintings is accurate to the specifications of family members. She said she hopes to finish sometime in June.
“I have the actual tools that Turner from the criminal justice department used to solve murders,” Lechler said. “I have also talked with family members, and other people who knew them, to make sure they look like how people want to remember them.”
Lechler said a lot of visitors to the cafeteria are interested in her work.
“I have a lot of people, especially art students, who are asking me what I am doing,” she said. “There have been faculty in here who say they knew these people on the wall and tell me I’ve done a good job capturing the people they were.”
