Last Look

This wall can talk

A new mural reflects Asian-American community at Yale.

Bob Handelman

Bob Handelman

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This multi-story mural on Crown Street is named, appropriately, Finding Home. It
celebrates the building it’s painted on: the Asian American Cultural Center, where Yale students of Asian heritage can find Asian community.

A committee of students, faculty, alumni, and administrators chose the artist, Lauren YoungSmith. She says the work was “designed around the megaphone as a symbol of outreach and activism,” and that the two people shown (“not necessarily
gender-binary”) represent all of Asia—“to dispel the myth that the diaspora is only
focused on the East Asian experience.”

And those shoes at far right? They reference the center’s foundation story. In the early 1980s, students of Asian descent had just one tiny meeting room. So they invited President A. Bartlett Giamatti ’60, ’64PhD, for a meeting and left all their shoes at the door. When Giamatti arrived, he got the point. And the students got their space.

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