After a campus-wide search, Carnegie Mellon School of Art sophomore Bella Alt’s Four Birds brings vibrant color to the walls of Wean Hall as a new permanent collection mural.

If you’re passing through Wean Hall — or refueling with a coffee at La Prima — you’ll now notice four panels of color about to take flight across the entrance’s concrete walls. Carnegie Mellon School of Art sophomore Bella Alt’s piece Four Birds is the latest permanent public artwork to come to campus after more than a yearlong process by the Undergraduate Student Senate and Graduate Student Assembly (GSA).

Four Birds depicts four species — a cardinal, blue heron, hummingbird, and robin — commonly found around Pittsburgh. “I wanted to create a piece that would have some meaning to everyone,” said Alt. “The one thing we all have in common is where we go to college, Pittsburgh, our new home for however long we are here.” Alt saw another symbolic meaning in the shared journeys of both birds and students: “We all travel to Pittsburgh before school, then we go our separate ways, but then we all come back, and birds do that too.”

Anthony Cheng, GSA Vice President of Campus Affairs and a fourth-year PhD student in Engineering and Public Policy, saw the initiative as an important step in showcasing more forms of student self-expression. “There wasn’t enough student-made art in public spaces on campus,” he said. “We wanted to change that by creating an initiative to support student artists and improve the campus environment.”

For Alt, a Chicago native who is blue-yellow colorblind, working in saturated palettes was simply a fun personal challenge she wanted to explore for herself. “It doesn’t really impact my day to day life, but seeing certain colors apart is difficult, any colors that are somewhat close in shade are a little challenging,” she said. “So I wanted to create a piece where the shadows and the highlights were very vibrant.” After mocking up the piece in Procreate, Alt scaled it in Photoshop for printing, spending more than 30 hours perfecting each panel, which were then transferred to large acrylic sheets by a local Pittsburgh printer.

Alt was a first-year Art student when the campus-wide call for submissions went out in September 2023, inviting students to propose pieces for various public spaces. Wean Hall, the only indoor site among the five proposed, offered a central location and an ideal backdrop. The student committee selected Four Birds from among 37 submissions for how it would enliven architect Dahlen Ritchey’s Brutalist design. “The building is very gray and blocky, so the mural provides a contrasting spontaneity to the place, making it a lot more colorful,” said Cheng. Installed in August 2024, the piece officially debuted in September at a reception for the students, faculty, and staff involved in the project.

“It’s a little surreal,” Alt said of seeing the piece in its permanent home. “I’ve found myself going to Wean just to look at it. There have been times when people have been talking about it, which is an awesome experience.”