Most of the library renovation work happening in Tutt Library is noisy, messy, dusty, and not much fun for the people in the building. But here’s a brilliantly shining silver lining to the project: artist Sandy Kinnee has loaned two of enormous, gorgeous abstract paintings for the duration of the renovation.

Special Collections has had many incarnations over the years. The space shown here:

now looks like this (photographed with a wide-angle lens by the artist):

The paintings are numbers 2285 and 2290 from his Stepping Stones Perhaps series of March 2016 (images courtesy of the artist):

Each painting in the series is about 14 feet long and 8 feet high, with some variation.

Where are all the books, you ask? Where are the cabinets and shelves? The books and files have been moved to non-browsable areas of Special Collections, mostly the “cage” across from the curator’s office. The college donated the cabinets and shelves to Queen Palmer Elementary School, where the students have become quite fond of them already as stand-up desks. We hope the Woman’s Educational Society will be pleased that the furniture they donated in 1977 is having a second life in a new kind of educational setting.

Starting this summer, the Sandy Kinnee Room (so dubbed by curator Jessy Randall) will be open for general study whenever the library is open. Special Collections researchers will work in the curator’s office, which now seats eight. We will use the Kinnee Room when we have more than eight researchers at a time and whenever we perform class instructions (about once a week during the school year).

Addendum, July 18, 2016: the Pokemon Go craze has come to Colorado College, and the creatures are everywhere. A visitor snapped this photo of a Diglett in in front of Kinnee’s work: