The perfect piece of public art comes to the Hill Library’s Ground Floor Reading Room

As you enter the Hill Library through the Brickyard, take a moment to walk through the Ground Floor Reading Room to your right. Maybe even sit down and open a laptop or book to do some work. Notice how pleasant you find the natural light streaming through the high windows. You could certainly spend some good hours here.

Although the room isn’t particularly large, it feels like a grand hall with the two-story ceiling, balcony seating, bright windows—and the newly installed, large-scale Joe Cox painting Untitled Mural (1983) on the far wall.

The painting was gifted to the Libraries by Ann and Jim Goodnight, along with seven smaller paintings and drawings of architectures and landscapes by Cox along the exterior wall beneath the windows. The SAS Institute originally commissioned Untitled Mural and displayed it on the SAS campus until earlier this year.

The painting itself is of a gallery interior seen from a diagonal angle. Hung as high as it is, the image mirrors the columns in the reading room, suggesting a continuation of the space into the image, beyond the angle of sight. The rectangular areas within the painting also match the windows along the Brickyard wall, making the painting feel like both a continuing space and a light source at the same time. Although you might not readily notice the painting, it causes you to feel both the comfort of the room’s enclosure and an open feeling of possibility in the space. The effect is so perfect that it’s hard to believe that the painting was not made as a site-specific work for the reading room.

“Before we installed the Joe Cox artworks, that blank wall in the Ground Floor Reading Room always bothered me because it was so visible from the Brickyard entrance,” says Patrick Deaton, Associate Director for Learning Spaces and Capital Management. “It seemed like an ideal location for a large-scale artwork. When Greg Raschke (Senior Vice Provost & Director of Libraries) sent me photos of the artworks in November 2024, I immediately thought about the wall in the reading room.”

This isn’t the first Joe Cox work at the Hill Library. If you’ve walked past Hill along Hillsborough Street at night, you’ve seen Cox’s 1972 mural Color Wall glowing through the library windows behind the Ask Us desk next to the back elevators. Although the work appears to the eye to be an arrangement of colored fluorescent tubes, it actually consists of a white wall, colored spotlights and black aluminum strips positioned at various angles. The lights change in irregular intervals over 30 times every two minutes.

Deaton has had his mind on placing art in this space for some time. During the planning of the Hill Library renovation that was completed in 2020, and which included a complete refresh of the Brickyard entrance, Deaton had artwork lighting added in the ceiling above the far wall, anticipating the eventual placement of some artwork there. He also had window film and motorized window shades added to the south-facing windows to control the afternoon sunlight. All that was missing was the art to go there. When Raschke sent photos of the Cox artworks to Deaton last fall, he immediately thought about the wall in the reading room. 

But, after getting approval from the campus Public Art Committee, there was some substantial prep work necessary to accommodate Untitled Mural. Deaton worked with Libraries colleagues Jamie Bradway and Sandra Varry in the Special Collections Resource Center, and Jamie Chapman in Operations, Logistics, & Environments, to determine how best to make the location work. The existing wall was not a smooth plane; it had pilasters and soffits dating back to the building's opening. So the Libraries team worked with Annette Snead, a Construction Engineer in Design & Construction, and Quality Builders, Inc. of Raleigh to modify the wall to create an uninterrupted and plywood-reinforced surface from the mezzanine handrail to the south-facing windows. They also added a piece of glass above the handrail to protect the artwork from food and beverages. 

Untitled Mural was installed over the summer while the Hill Library was closed for updates to the building’s electrical infrastructure. Preparator Andrew Nagy worked with Bradway, Chapman and others at the Libraries on the installation. However, the two-part work had never been framed when installed at SAS, so the Libraries had to have custom stretchers made and the paintings gradually attached and stretched so as not to endanger the acrylic medium on their surfaces. Bradway had some anxiety about whether or not the works would fit on the wall. 

“I proposed that wall without a single thought about the content of the artwork, just that it was close to the right size if the wall could be modified,” Bradway says. “I had sleepless nights about those measurements even after they were triple- and quadruple-checked. Andrew and his crew used the Ground Floor Reading Room to prep the artwork on July 28, and that was the first time we had the paintings in the space. Until then, it was all numbers on screens and hard to trust.”

“My intense relief hit a bit before the completion of the project, just knowing everything was going to fit,” he continues. “That allowed me to really enjoy the install, which didn't need my presence at all, but I didn't want to miss any of it. I still receive such joy from this new space. It's not on my way anywhere, but I still walk by it a couple times a week.”

Bradway isn’t the only person who marvels at how perfectly Cox’s work looks in its new home.

“Once the artwork was installed, it really did seem like it was meant to be there all along,” Deaton says. “The proportions of the columns in the artwork are very similar to the proportions of the columns in the reading room. Depending on the lighting conditions, at some times in the day, the color of the shadowed side of the columns in the artwork is very similar to the color of the shadowed side of the columns in the reading room.”

“The artwork aligns with the high windows on the south wall and expands on the view through the existing window at the east end of the reading room. At the same time, the artwork is abstract enough to allow viewers to appreciate it as a composition of shapes and colors that invites their own interpretation.”

About the artist
Joseph H. Cox (1915-1997) was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, and studied art at the John Herron Art School and the University of Iowa. Cox began exhibiting early in his career with entries in the 1939 Golden Gate International Exhibition in San Francisco and the 1941 Carnegie International exhibition. His images are primarily urban landscapes, and he worked in oils, watercolors and acrylics. He also created murals in two United States Post Offices and received funding through the New Deal. He taught art at universities in Iowa, Florida and Tennessee, but most of his teaching career was spent at NC State. He began teaching here in 1954 and retired in 1980. In retirement, Cox and his wife Betsy moved to the North Carolina coast to explore a passion for sailing. The Joe Cox Papers are housed at the Libraries’ Special Collections Research Center.