UALR’s newest campus building, the Student Services Center, has its first piece of art – “Fiesta Baroque and Dantata Domine” by Dorothy Gillespie.

The art piece is an installation of shaped aluminum pieces painted with enamel paint, celebrating repetition and rhythm, color, movement, and pattern.

The piece hangs three stories high in the building’s glass enclosed atrium in an area where students can meet with recruiters, advisers, and counselors to register, enroll, and arrange for financial aid.

Gillespie originally designed the piece for the University Conference Center downtown and from summer 2009 – spring 2012 it hung in the UALR William H. Bowen School of Law.

Born to a genteel southern family in Roanoke, Va., in 1920, Gillespie knew at an early age that she was destined to be an artist. She arrived in 1943, fresh from art school, in New York City, where she still maintains a studio. In a career that has now spanned more than 60 years, Gillespie has earned a place among the finest American women artists of her time and a mentor for generations of younger artists.

In 2003, New York’s Rockefeller Center celebrated Gillespie’s work with a major outdoor installation. From the Guggenheim Museum to Walt Disney World, her dazzling, rhythmic, life-affirming work on canvas, paper, and metal is featured in many public spaces and many private, corporate and museum collections throughout the U.S. and internationally.

At 92, splitting her time between her Orlando and New York City studios, Gillespie continues her career at a dizzying pace.

“This move and installation in the new Student Services Center would never have happened were it not for Nathan Larson, assistant curator, John Bruhl, applied design technician, and applied design student Luke Bellweather,” said Brad Cushman, director of the UALR Galleries.