ART: Violent Visions in a Silent Space

Jacquelynn Baas documents the history of how José Clemente Orozco’s powerful murals came to be painted on the Dartmouth campus.

In 1768, the founder of Dartmouth College, the Reverend Eleazar Wheelock, sent “a small specimen of the produce and manufacture of the American wilderness” — a pipe, tobacco pouch, knife case and several other articles — to the College’s benefactor, the Second Earl of Dartmouth. From its very beginnings, the remote location of this New England College fostered an active commitment to providing students with examples of the “natural and moral world,” as museum and library collections were thought of then.