NC State Color Wall Relighting This Weekend

We told you back in July of 2009 about how you could save the Joe Cox Color Wall over at NC State and it looks like all of the hard work from the Goodnight, Raleigh! crew has worked and the wall will be relit this weekend as part of the grand re-opening of Hillsborough Street.

The official re-lighting can been seen from the Hillsborough Street side of the D. H. Hill Library on the NC State campus at 8 pm on Saturday, September 25th and everyone is welcome to attend.

After an incredibly successful fundraising campaign led by the local community, the Color Wall in the North Carolina State University D. H. Hill Library will be re-lit on September 25th in conjunction with celebrations scheduled for the official re-opening of Hillsborough Street in Raleigh.

Commissioned by Chancellor John T. Caldwell in 1972, the Color Wall is a huge display of light and form that beams out over Hillsborough Street through a library window facing the surrounding community.  Created by long-time College of Design professor and Raleigh artist Joe Cox, the work is a bold, brilliant, and strikingly whimsical symbol of NC State and the learning embodied in the NCSU Libraries.

Though many have long considered the Color Wall the most significant and appreciated piece of 20th century public art in the state capital, the aging of its original mechanical switching system has made it inoperable for long periods over the last decade or so.  Inspired by the interest of a community group convened as the Color Wall Committee, over 150 people who love NC State and the Libraries have donated more than $30,000 to replace the Color Wall’s switching system and set up a permanent endowment to keep it operating into the future. The campaign also received the support of several influential locally-based blogs and benefitted from a generous gift of Cox’s paintings from his niece Janice McAninch and husband Skip, works that were shown and sold at the Lee Hansley Gallery.

“The Color Wall has long represented the almost magical merging of science, art and people that NC State has brought to the economy and culture of North Carolina,” explains Susan Nutter, vice provost and director of the NCSU Libraries.  “We are so proud to see it shining out from the Libraries again, and so grateful to the community that made it possible.”

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