FINDING IT: "Rainbow" is located at the end of the hallway outside 1800 Engineering Hall.

When Judith Azur tired of painting portraits, her change of scenery was serigraphy, or silk screening. “Rainbow,” her 1974 three-part serigraph, is fourth in a series of 10 artist’s proofs and won Azur a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Printmaking and Drawing in 1975. “I liked it for its boldness and for the focal point it provides upon entering the corridor on the way to the auditorium,” says Emeritus College of Engineering Dean John Bollinger.

Serigraphy is a color stencil-printing process in which artists use a squeegee to force special paint through a fine screen onto paper or fabric. They use a separate stencil for each color and, to achieve the desired effect, might incorporate more than 100 colors.

Bold primary colors distinguish Azur’s work, which is included in collections in the Library of Congress, Warner Brothers Studios and the Chase Manhattan Bank, among others. In Madison, you also can find the artist’s serigraphs in collections at the Elvehjem Museum of Art and the Madison Art Center. Azur, whose name originally was Mazur, died of cancer about a decade ago.

Donated by Warren E. Gilson, a UW-Madison Medical School alumnus.
Installed in spring 1994.

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