Public Art of the Week: MSU Zodiac sculptures

Steve Robinson, president of Lansing Community College and a graduate of Michigan State University, was recently reminiscing on Facebook about one of his earliest memories of visiting MSU and seeing the large modernist art pieces displayed on the sides of two buildings in the Brody Complex. 

The sculptures were created in 1957 by two Midwestern artists, Doris Hall and Kalman Kubinyi, a husband-wife team. Their idea was to create 12 sculptures representing the signs of the Zodiac. Three of those sculptures were completed and installed on Butterfield and Bailey halls (Pisces, Aries and Aquarius). But controversy derailed the other nine signs, according to Kurt Dewhurst, a longtime MSU folklife curator and co-author of “Buildings, Places, Spaces: Architecture and the Campus Park of Michigan State University.” 

Robinson said in his post he first noticed the illuminated sculptures from a car window while driving through campus at night. 

I really gave those sculptures little thought when I attended MSU since I lived on East Campus and most of my classes were on Central Campus. I was only in a Brody Complex Dormitory one time in my MSU career. 

Today, it is difficult to see the sculptures from Harrison Road since some large trees obscure them when they leaf out. 

The Brody complex and the individual dorms in the complex are named for MSU luminaries from the early days of the college and most of the namesakes were involved in the teaching of agricultural sciences. Brody Complex, which comprises six residence halls, was constructed in the mid-1950s on the site of a former dump.