Grounds for Graffiti
‘A wall for the people’: Exploring the graffiti walls’ place in OU history RYAN MAXIN NEWS EDITOR Just over the Richland Avenue bridge, right in front of Bentley Annex, stands three large walls that, for the last few decades, have acted as beacons of free speech for the Ohio University community. Known widely as the graffiti walls, these relics of student expression may appear to someone unfamiliar
with them as illegal displays of art. However, students and others who utilize the walls are familiar with them as an encouraged form of self-expression. Although the three-wall setup is an iconic fixture of OU’s Athens campus, the walls look very different today than their inception long ago. In fact, the three walls used to be one large wall that occupied the space where Bentley Annex currently sits. According to a previous Post report from 2002, the original wall was built in 1926. It wasn’t until 1967 that
Students paint the graffiti wall for Welcome Week. (RYAN GRZYBOWSKI | FOR THE POST)
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members of a student athletic organization, the Metro A.C.’s, painted the wall to show support for their club, according to a 2008 Post report. The next week, members of OU’s hockey team painted over the original message, which was then painted over by OU staff, according to the 2008 report. Others would follow suit, and OU eventually stopped painting over the messages. The graffiti wall was born. In April 2001, the original wall was torn down to make room for Bentley Annex, according to a previous Post report from that time. Portions of the wall were sold to students and alumni to make money for the new university center, according to the aforementioned 2002 Post report, and the current walls were built following Bentley Annex’s completion. No matter the form they took, though, the walls have been used to spread all kinds of messages: political pleas, marriage memos and everything in between. They are especially important to Aimee Ford Foster, a 1986 OU graduate and alumna of The Post, who said painting the original, large wall gave her a sense of belonging when she participated for the first time as a freshman with some of her friends. “It was just so incredible,” Foster said. “You don’t have outlets like that in high school or in your hometown. And to go up there and join these people, as I’m just forming friendships at OU, to paint the wall, it was a real cool experience.” On visits back to Athens, Foster said she remembers thinking the messages of today’s graffiti walls were more organized than when she attended OU and that the messages seem to promote the university more often than they did in the past. The graffiti on the wall in the mid-1980s, she said, resembled the conventional idea of what graffiti is — more than pretty pictures, it was haphazard. “It had that air of being kind of edgy and risque,” she said. “You never knew what you were going to see.” This trait contributed to Foster’s description of the wall as a “touchstone.” On any given stroll past the wall, one could see the thoughts, feelings and popular topics of the university community, she said. And while traditions are surely part of every univer-
