John Lewis Plaza — the open stone square you're standing in.
Somewhere near you there's a long wooden beam, thirty-four feet of it, hand-carved and left out in the weather. That's by Martin Puryear, and he called it Bending the Arc. The title comes from Martin Luther King's line about the arc of the moral universe being long, but bending toward justice.
Puryear is one of the great living American sculptors. He represented the United States at the Venice Biennale. And the reason his work looks the way it does is a detour he took in his twenties. He joined the Peace Corps and spent two years in Sierra Leone, where he watched local carpenters build furniture with hand tools and no drawings, and decided that was the education he actually wanted. Then he went to Sweden to learn cabinetmaking. He has been shaping wood by hand ever since. A man who could have anything fabricated instead carved thirty-four feet of it himself and left it in a Chicago winter.
Now look at the name on the plaza
. John Lewis. Not Obama. John Lewis.
And once you catch that, the whole campus starts doing something odd.
The auditorium in the Forum building is the Elie Wiesel Auditorium. The atrium is named for Hadiya Pendleton, a fifteen-year-old from the South Side who performed at Obama's second inauguration and was shot and killed in a park about a week after she came home. The room at the very top of t
