Miller residents, BEAT Bias team up to turn vandalism into art

Students met Tuesday night in Miller Hall to discuss ideas for a mural to be painted in the dorm's central stairwell, in order to combat inappropriate graffiti that tarnished the dorm earlier this semester.
    Miller Hall residents noticed last month offensive vandalism after a drunken student wrote in permanent marker on walls, columns and other surfaces. Some messages took a homophobic or sexual theme, while others were inoffensive in their messages.
    One particular message attacked Miller custodians, and comments on a second-floor stairwell that displayed homophobic comments particularly irked residents.
    The vandalism in that stairwell stayed up for about a week and a half before it was finally covered up, but some markings remain visible.
    A student from another dorm has since admitted fault.
    After the dorm was defaced, two members of the Bias Education and Awareness Team (BEAT Bias) who live in Miller came up with the idea of creating a "safe space" in the dorm.
    BEAT Bias, an on-campus student group that promotes issues of dialogue and tolerance and trains residential advisors, teamed up with Miller's residential advisory team and decided to create a mural over the stairwell graffiti.
    Samantha Frank, one of the BEAT Bias members, described the vandalism as "off-putting."
    "We need to address it in a way that can strengthen the community," Frank, a sophomore, said.
    At last night's meeting, a number of students spoke about creative ways to convey positive messages in the new mural. One main point the group stressed was to turn the offensive graffiti into graffiti art, taking the negative connotation that graffiti holds and turning it into something positive.
    Other key themes were incorporating words as well as symbols and portraying the Tufts community in relation to the rest of the world.
    Ideas for this approach included painting empowering words such as "knowledge," "strength" and "respect" in the style of graffiti.
    The students agreed to leave certain bricks open for personalized space in which people can mark symbols or words that are important to them. Symbols would include traditional Tufts-related images, as well as universal icons and certain words painted in different languages.
    An elephant with its legs and trunk spelling "Miller" may serve as the mural's centerpiece.
    "We want to send the message that this is our safe space," said freshman Kathryn Salwen, the other BEAT Bias member who lives in Miller and who is involved with the mural project. "We can change this in a positive way."
    "The most important part of the mural is the act of people taking responsibility for their hall," another BEAT Bias member who does not live in Miller, Christine Kim, said.
    "They want to accomplish something to fight the graffiti -- something of theirs to claim in the community," Kim, a junior, said.
    The students, who feel confident in the power of the potential painting, have little concern about future defacement of their mural.
    "It's not necessarily that people think about their actions and try to attack the community," Salwen said. "I think people just do stupid things. They wouldn't be as aggressive to ruin something beautiful that students did."
    Once the students draw up a mock design, administrators in the Office of Residential Life and Learning must give their approval. The group hopes to begin work in the next few weeks.