Leadership as Art

A soaring three-story mural in Kathleen McCartney Hall offers a compelling narrative about the power of the Smith experience and the value of collaborative leadership.

“Seeing it, I was like—whoa! I could not have pictured in my head how big it would be,” says Eloise Van Meter ’26, a double major in studio art and French studies who created the piece along with fellow mural intern Ruby Goldstein ’26 and Boston-based artist Julia Emiliani.

Designed digitally and installed in April, the mural wraps around the building’s central staircase, providing a vibrant, colorful visual element to greet and inspire visitors. “There are a lot of corners in the stairwell, and the mural is at an angle, so all of those elements were interesting puzzle pieces to pull together,” Van Meter says.

Bringing the mural to life was a true collaboration. Van Meter and Goldstein spent hours combing through the Smith College Archives, looking for inspiration in scrapbooks, photos, and other relics from previous generations of Smithies. They also asked fellow students what they wanted to see in a mural. “That feedback heavily influenced what ended up in the mural,” Van Meter says. Van Meter and Goldstein also presented their ideas to a board of campus stakeholders, including faculty, staff, and students. Once concepts were approved, they worked remotely with Emiliani to turn the winning ideas into art. The final piece comprises 90-plus scenes that encapsulate key elements of the Smith experience, including Mountain Day and the history of student activism. A companion guide created by Goldstein and Van Meter provides context for many of the scenes.

Emiliani relied on Goldstein and Van Meter to educate her about campus culture so she could create an accurate and authentic piece of art. “She would prompt us with: Draw me something that feels iconic to Smith,” Van Meter says. “So we did our best to do that, and the sketches that Ruby and I submitted to her, she put them in her own style so the mural would have a cohesive look.”

Goldstein, a double major in studio art and history, says her favorite scene in the mural is a depiction of the Smith Chop. “Basically, a lot of people come to campus with long hair, and once they’re here for maybe a semester or less, they get the Smith Chop—where another student cuts your hair, and it’s usually a distinctly queer hairstyle,” Goldstein explains. “In the archives, we found an image of a student cutting another student’s hair, and I was like, ‘This is so perfect. This is so Smith-specific.’”

Given that the mural lives in McCartney Hall, home of the Lazarus Center for Career Development and the Wurtele Center for Collaborative Leadership, it was important for Goldstein and Van Meter to also include scenes of collaborative leadership, which was more difficult than they thought.

“We wanted to avoid scenes of leadership that were just like someone winning at the expense of someone else losing, like I got the job and you didn’t,” Goldstein says. “We wanted to showcase leadership in a way that felt like bringing together a community and celebrating a bunch of different kinds of work. We spent a long time looking at photos of student protests and really delved into the history of athletics at Smith, collecting images that might not be what you traditionally think of in terms of leadership.”

The plan is to evolve the piece into something new in five years, giving a fresh cohort of student artists a chance to leave their mark at Smith.

“The idea for the mural to be temporary was built into the project from its original conceptualization, with the idea that leadership and career themes are shifting and dynamic, and we want the space to be a canvas for future generations of Smithies to be able to interpret what that means to them over time rather than installing something static and unchanging,” says Wurtele Center Director Erin Park Cohn ’00, who led the McCartney Hall mural board. “We also want to offer more opportunities down the road for student interns to participate in the creation of a future mural, so this isn’t just a one-time project.”