Everyone is familiar with that stark binary choice: you can either talk the talk or walk the walk. Those who do the former exasperate us; those who get ambulatory we applaud. Since last fall, however, members of the Lehman College community have been enjoying a third possibility: walk the talk.

	The wisdom of "Intersections" (photo, Brad Martin)

That is, they have been walking through the striking new main entrance to the College, which features the “talk” of human civilization—everything from 4,500-year-old mathematical hieroglyphics to the plaque put on the Jupiter probe Pioneer 10 to a Bronx River bank petroglyph turtle to Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” to Bishop Tutu’s “I am because you are.”

The new entrance – from Goulden Avenue, opposite the Jerome Park Reservoir – establishes for the first time a clearly-defined east-west corridor for the campus. It consists of three distinct but interconnected elements: a stainless-steel-and-limestone Department of Public Safety building housing state-of-the-art systems for safety, security, and emergency response; a new walkway and plaza; and a striking work of conceptual art, titled “Intersections,” by the New York artist Wopo Holup. Fox and Fowle Architects and Mathews Nielsen Landscape Architecture collaborated on the project. Dedication ceremonies were on October 16.

It is safe to say this is the only CUNY campus entrance that requires a 27-page guide for full enjoyment. Also titled Intersections, it was edited by Lehman’s chief librarian, Rona Ostrow and can be accessed on the College website, www.lehman.cuny.edu.

One of the first details one notices on arriving is a bronze owl just about to lift off a wall blazoned with the College’s name. In an “Artist’s Statement,” Holup explains: “This work of public art is about wisdom and the interplay of old and new ideas. The owl is an ancient symbol of wisdom. My owl sculpture…complements an older owl located high on Gillet Hall, to the left as you enter the gate. This old owl and a desire to combine the distinctive old and new styles of architecture provided the basic concepts for the Intersections project.”

Holup’s public art projects are to be seen in every borough but Staten Island. They include bas-relief murals in three Bronx subway stations, her “River that Flows Two Ways” in Battery Park, and the on-going “Common Ground” project along the Brooklyn-Queens expressway, the largest work of public art ever commissioned by New York State.

The essence of Holup’s design is the placement in the pavement of a variety of quotations, equations and visual symbols expressing profound thoughts or great achievements. Holup asked members of every part of the Lehman community for suggestions. “As the words and symbols came in,” she writes, “they seemed to cluster around six main themes: the Heavens, I, We, Words, Time, and Opposition.”

These six themes are presented in the plaza at the east end, in intersecting fashion. In the walkway connecting the main gate and the plaza Holup created a “Chronology of Writing” on horizontal strips of etched bluestone. Among the choices here are the first few measures of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, suggested by professor of music Gheorghe Costinescu, and the equation for the combustion of glucose sugar (the source of energy for most living organisms), suggested by chemistry professor Marc Lazarus.

Among the “Heavens” elements are Sappho’s “The moon has set, and the Pleiades; it is midnight, and time passes, and I sleep alone” and a Yoruba proverb, “The sky is vast enough for all birds to fly without colliding.” “I” calls forth some very famous words: Muhammad Ali’s “I am the greatest” and Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” and Governor Herbert Lehman’s “I will not compromise with my conscience.”
In the “We” section are a passage from Martin Luther King, Jr’s “I have a dream” speech and the first words of the U.N. Charter, “We the peoples…” – appropriately, given the College’s involvement in the creation of the U.N.

For the “Words” area, Lehman President Ricardo Fernández suggested Caesar Augustus’ “Festina lente” (Latin for “make haste slowly”), and social work professor Richard Holody urged Beckett’s “You must say words, as long as there are any… must go on, I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” In the “Time” section can be found Einstein’s “E=mc2” Shakespeare’s “The readiness is all,” and the more down-to-earth “No time like the present,” which was coined by one of the first women to earn a living as a writer, Mary Manley, in 1709.

In the “Opposition” part of the plaza are Hamlet’s famous words, as well as revolutionary Emiliano Zapata’s battle cry “Tierra y libertad” (“land and liberty”), and a suggestion that came from the artist’s son: Niels Bohr’s “A great truth is one whose opposite is also a great truth.”
The opening of “Intersections” was one of the last events in a year-long celebration of Lehman College’s 35th anniversary. “Here, surrounded by many voices, across many ages, cultures and disciplines,” President Fernández said of those who walk along “Intersections,” “may they seek—and find—their rightful place in the wondrous cycle of knowledge and aspiration laid out before them.”

The entire project was funded through the CUNY-N.Y. State Dormitory Authority “Percent for Art” program, which sets aside one percent of new construction costs for public art. “Intersections” joins five other public art works on campus.

Fittingly, the last words in the “Intersections” guide, selected by the entire Lehman community, come from a lecture on King Lear by the College’s founding president, Leonard Lief: “What is significant is how we die, fulfilled or ignorant.”