"Vee I" by Larry Mohr (Peter Cady/The Mirror)
They kind of look like French fries.
If you’re ever walking through the quad past Gonzaga towards Canisius, you’ll encounter two large sculptures that resemble everyone’s favorite fast food snack.
The sculptures, one yellow and one red, are the work of New York artist Larry Mohr, and they have graced Fairfield’s campus since the early 1980s.
They are “constructionist abstractions — powerful forms using industrial materials, forged in the style of David Smith,” according to Phillip Eliasoph of the visual and performing arts department.
“Vee I,” the red sculpture, stands in memorial to those Catholics who helped Jews during the Holocaust. It arrived on campus in 1982, and currently stands between Gonzaga and Regis.
Only two years later, Fairfield received “Criss Cross V,” the yellow sculpture located between Gonzaga and Canisius.
Mohr donated the works to campus in honor of his childhood friend Christopher J. Mooney, who later become a Jesuit and the academic vice president at Fairfield, according to Eliasoph.
They are constructed out of I-Beam Cor-Ten steel and painted yellow and red.
Eliasoph said that having art around campus is very important because it “adds another critical dimension to the aesthetic landscape of our campus” and “the more we experience widens our lens of the visual world.”
However, few students seemed to know what the statues were for or where they came from.
“I thought it was just modern art,” said Dan Shapiro ’10. “They have them at Muhlenberg so when I first saw them, I thought it was something that all the universities were doing.”
Tara DaSilva ’10 agreed, adding that their location near the quad means not many people see them.
“I honestly didn’t pay that much notice to them, even as an art minor,” she said. “Honestly, it looks like it is just part of the landscape. People see it there, but it doesn’t bring up a topic of conversation.”
Chelsea Bielecki ’12, a quad resident, said that she doesn’t think many people pay attention to them.
“I don’t really understand them but I think they’re aesthetically pleasing,” said Bielecki. “It’s a nice change of color from of all the monotonous grays of the dorms.”
Shawne Lomauro ‘11 appreciates the art pieces and wishes to see art in more places across campus.
“I think they bring something really important to the quad because they’re something other than just grass. I like that they’re something colorful, and the fact that we’ve taken art and expanded it somewhere new on campus is fantastic,” she said.
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