Release date: July 15, 2005
Contact: Beverly Cox Clark, Assistant Director, University Media Relations,
at 404-712-8780 or beverly.clark@emory.edu

Emory Faculty Member Shapes Environment with Art

C.W. "Woody" Hickcox's office door at Emory University has just one adornment — a small watercolor of a Japanese magnolia. That may be because the senior lecturer is too busy embellishing the doors and walls of Emory's environmental studies department with an ever-increasing panorama of his artwork.

The doorways of faculty and staff members are often lined with Hickcox's distinctive small watercolors of landscapes, insects and flowers, prints that are as collected and prized as rare baseball cards. Framed prints line one hallway. Then there are the murals: a bright monarch by the recycling bins; a five-foot high hot pink flamingo in the women's restroom and a New Zealand shrimp in the men's; a giant sunfish on the doors to a mechanical room and a more abstract rendering of zebras at the end of a dark hall.

The signature piece perhaps is Hickcox's first mural, a Japanese crane that greets visitors on the wall of a stairwell as they ascend to the fifth floor, an endeavor he will gladly tell you didn't evolve out of a committee. He just painted it. This somewhat risky venture was met with an overwhelming positive response.

"Woody's artwork really sets the tone and character of the department. There's no place on campus like us," says John Wegner, Emory's chief environmental officer and a senior lecturer in environmental studies, who has seven of Hickcox's works taped to his door.

Before the department moved to the fifth floor of Emory's new Mathematics and Science Center in 2002, faculty members' labs were often in remote spots. For Hickcox, whose lab was in the basement of a building where he rarely saw colleagues, moving into the new light-filled space was a revelation. Soon after, he began literally sharing his work with colleagues, placing prints of his watercolors above the nameplates by their doors. The pieces of artwork, however, don't stay put for long. Hickcox will randomly switch them out, always putting up something that reflects the personality or research of the person.

"I see the artwork as a welcoming thing for students — it gives the floor a cache that isn't overwhelming," Hickcox says. "It's really given me a lot of satisfaction to share my work with everyone."

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