‘E Pluribus Unum’ Mural

With debates raging over the use of artificial intelligence in art, it’s a good reminder that computers have aided artists for quite some time. An early example of this mix of technology and art can be found on the side of a building, through the massive E Pluribus Unum mosaic that is found on the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point campus. 

The UWSP campus is otherwise not traditionally thought of as beautiful—it retains a lot of the gray concrete Brutalism found across America during the height of the 1960s and 1970s. This is the result of the school’s ninth president (and future governor of Wisconsin), Lee Sherman Dreyfus, who made it his mission to modernize the school. Dreyfus was gregarious and preferred unconventional outreach, at one point telling students, "My initials are LSD and we’re going on a trip together somewhere!" He saw UWSP as a potential technological marvel where one day every student could watch Mission: Impossible in their own dorm room, or even learn remotely by computer.

To achieve this progressive vision, some of the past would have to go. At UWSP, the target was "Old Main." This building, for nearly a century the center of campus, had been condemned and emptied by 1970. To salve losing this icon, Dreyfus tapped Richard C. Schneider, a UWSP art professor and ceramicist, with the challenge of preserving the building somehow on a wall of the new College of Natural Resources building. Professor Schneider’s answer would take the better part of a decade to build, and meet the president’s call for a futuristic campus.

Schneider designed a mural that represented the university in the form of a universal human figure. The state of Wisconsin would be represented by state symbols such as the muskie and badger, and its history through a large representation of the Sauk leader Black Hawk. In the center of the image, the cupola of Old Main would be preserved. (Ironically, by 1976, the actual Old Main was also preserved after being placed on the National Historic Register, and it still stands today.)

With the design in place, the execution relied on two key aspects: computer technology and volunteer labor. The design was divided into 286,200 squares by a computer, and each square was evaluated from light to dark on a 28-point scale. Twenty-eight matching tile designs were created, and then the work began. Volunteers would spend the next four years making the tiles according to the patterns, firing them, and then affixing them to panels in accordance with the overall design. Finally, by 1982, the last of the panels were affixed to the wall, and the mural was complete.

The finished mural stands 150 feet long by 50 feet high, connected to 113 rows of panels by more than 7,000 screws. At the time of its completion, it was believed to be the largest computer-aided mural in the country. Just south of the mural, a plaza called the Specht Forum contained a sundial, to add to the feeling of natural resources. A renovation began in 2023 to refurbish and beautify the sundial for the next generation, to complete the vista.

Even today, many former students still recall the incredible group effort that went into making this futuristic mosaic a reality. Despite being a technological wonder, Professor Schneider and his volunteers would end up glazing hundreds of thousands of tiles by hand for years to make it happen. The mural’s two names honor this shared effort, as it was entitled E Pluribus Unum, or in English, "From Many, One."