College of Design History- The Early Artists

This blog is part of a series of posts featuring stories and photos from NC State’s College of Design, formerly School of Design. In celebration of the College’s 75th anniversary, the Special Collections Research Center (SCRC) created an exhibit titled “College of Design: 75 Years of Designing Tomorrow.” The exhibit opens in the D.H. Hill Jr. Library’s exhibit gallery after spring break March 2024. Graduate students Shima Hosseininasab, Kelly Arnold, and Alana Gomez worked together to create content for the exhibit and blog posts.

When Dean Henry Kamhoefner (1907-1990) opened the School of Design at NC State in 1948, he hired architects and artists at the top of their field, encouraging them to perfect their practice outside of their teaching responsibilities. One of these early faculty members, abstract painter and muralist Joe Cox, stated that “... The environment [in the school] is such that we can teach as much as we like and still set an example of professional excellence through our designing, sculpting and painting.” 

Through the School of Design, Cox became one of North Carolina’s leading artists and art educators. His paintings and murals, primarily oils, watercolors, and acrylic images of urban landscapes, are found in the collections of numerous museums and corporate offices throughout the United States. On campus Cox’s legacy lives on in the D.H Hill Libray’s Color Wall, operational since January 1972. The mural consists of a white wall, colored spotlights, and black aluminum strips. These elements work harmoniously together to display hundreds of vertical bands of multicolored light overlooking Hillsborough Street on campus.  

Other artists at the School of Design included Manuel Bromberg (1917-2022) and Duncan Stuart (1919-2001), who both served in World War II in an artistic capacity. Bromberg won a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for creative painting in 1946, and he joined the faculty of the School of Design in 1949. He remained at NC State until 1954; during this time, he created a mural for the Erdahl-Cloyd Student Union that still exists in the Atrium Food Court today. 

Stuart was a painter, designer and mathematician, and one of the founding faculty members of the School of Design. In the 1950s he worked on the geodesic dome design with Synergetics, Inc. During his long and distinguished career, Stuart’s works were exhibited at a number of institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, and the Chicago Art Institute. The Gregg Museum on NC State campus houses five of Stuart’s works in their permanent collection. The mediums used in these pieces, lithograph, oil on canvas, pen and ink, and pencil on paper, show Stuart’s versatility. Artists like Stuart, Bromberg, and Cox added an important perspective to the School of Design’s modern-focused architecture vision. 

“College of Design: 75 Years of Designing Tomorrow” opens in March 2024 in the exhibit gallery of the D.H. Hill Jr. Library. You can visit the exhibit during Hill Library’s hours for the rest of the year. 

If you have any questions or are interested in viewing Special Collections materials, please contact us at library_specialcollections@ncsu.edu or submit a request online. The Special Collections Research Center is open by appointment only. Appointments are available Monday–Friday, 9am–6pm and Saturday, 1pm–5pm. Requests for a Saturday appointment must be received no later than Tuesday of the same week.