Ad Astra
Hutchinson, Kansas 2002
Assisted by Camille Bachand, Charlie Roberts, Trey Morgan, Chris Rexroad and Phillip Tyson
"THE constellations," the design team said "you know, the Big Dipper, Little Dipper, and… the other ones." "But who decided how to connect all those dots? I mean, couldn't we just as well make up our own?,” I asked. It took a little more discussing, but eventually we settled on creating our own set of constellations that would reflect the history and culture of Hutchinson. We were off and running. A train locomotive, sunflower, tractor, bison, and Sputnik were among our new star diagrams. After visiting a local physics professor, the molecular diagram for salt was added along with a hawk, and basketball players reaching at a tip-off.
This poetic take on constellations led me to the great Kansas poet Steven Hine, who led me to the great Kansas poet William Stafford (who grew up in Hutch) and to a stanza in his beautiful poem Keepsakes that reads, Any star is enough if you know what star it is. Perfect, I thought. Incorporating that line of the poem into the design led to the final element in the central part of the mural. Stafford was added gazing at the night sky as he wrote, while an astronomer looked at the stars through the lens of science, while a young boy perched on his parent's shoulders touched a bison constellation that grown-ups could only imagine.
These new constellations were framed on the left by a giant shock of wheat supported by Kansas quilt patterns, and on the right by a nearly life size Ferris wheel illuminated in the twilight. Below the wheat and Ferris wheel panels are six smaller panels two of which were designed by Hutchinson students and their counterparts visiting for the summer from Northern Ireland. In 2012, the mural was restored by with the help of Ashley Laird.
