School Notes: Yale College
November/December 2022

New artwork in Grace Hopper College

Twelve new decorative windows were unveiled on September 12 in Grace Hopper College. 

Artist Faith Ringgold designed six windows for the college’s common room. They depict students reading in a library, playing pickup basketball, working a pottery wheel, painting a canvas, and gathered at a table for a meal. One of the panels features Hopper, standing in front of a blackboard bearing lines of computer code. 

Seattle-based artist Barbara Earl Thomas designed six windows for the dining hall. One of them depicts the college’s name change, symbolized by a hummingbird moving a banner bearing Hopper’s name into the foreground while a robin carries a Calhoun banner into the background. Another shows a young Black man, who has broken free from chains, clutching a book to his chest underneath the words “Art,” “Science,” “History Past,” and “History Present.” A third, commemorating the 1969 coeducation of Yale College, depicts women students outside the residential college. 

Thomas also designed metalwork and glass portraits of Grace Murray Hopper and Roosevelt L. Thompson ’84, an African American former resident of the college and a Rhodes Scholar who died in a car accident during his senior year, which will occupy two stone niches flanking the dining hall’s last bay of windows. These works will be installed later this fall. (For a Yale Alumni Magazine article about the new windows, see page 38.)

Book features alumni, faculty, and New Haven leaders

Our Red Book, an expanded version of New York Times bestselling My Little Red Book, created by Yale alum Rachel Kauder Nalebuff ’13, will be published November 1 from Simon & Schuster. Our Red Book takes readers through stories of first periods, last periods, missing periods, and everything about bleeding that people wish they had been told. Weaving together powerful voices—from teenagers, indigenous scholars, incarcerated writers, elected leaders, friends transitioning genders, and lovers—the book presents a collective journey of growth and change. This edition features voices of Yale alumni and faculty writers, as well as community leaders in New Haven.