There’s something wrong on campus this year. Have you noticed it? Perhaps it’s the fear of an incoming economic disaster on a scale unseen since 1929, brought on by over-investment in our newest form of ground-breaking technology and evidenced in the blank, optimistic stare of business majors infesting Dodge Hall.
Perhaps it’s the growing fear of political violence being carried out across American cities, like that seen just recently at the Harvard Medical School a few stops down on the Green Line. Or, perhaps, it’s simply the anticipation of our impending societal collapse. The truth is it’s none of these things. Look into the faces of everyday Northeastern students you see on the way to class, and you can clearly identify a profound malaise in the eyes of every single one. It fills the air like a miasma every time you step foot on our cancerous growth of a campus. The cause? A lack of whimsy. The prognosis? Dire, unless we make some drastic changes to our living environment.
“Rooted” was a private art installation by Cecily Carew, located in Krentzman Quadrangle starting in April 2024. It was composed of five 15-foot tree-like structures “growing” out of the green, painted in bright colors and topped with vibrant, glittering puffs of tulle. Carew is a local artist who escaped the hazy nightmare that is Los Angeles, California for the gloomy hellscape known as Boston. Her abstract mixed media art installations are vibrant and fluid. They seem to take a different shape from every angle you look at them, and inject a feeling of warmth and joy into any dreary gallery they’re installed in. And for four, perfect months, we got a taste of that for ourselves here at Northeastern. “Rooted” transformed the ugliest spot in Northeastern’s campus to a wonderland, gracing the eyes of students and faculty as they passed through its central hub.
It is not surprising to me now that “Rooted” was short-lived. Northeastern’s campus life is representative of our current age, a time when sincerity is punished and irony fuels the power of our strongest, dumbest politicians. Students complained about Carew’s trees from the moment they were installed. New alumni who wanted their graduation photos to smell like Huntington Avenue complained about the presence of the trees, as if there’s not a million prettier places to take them. Consensus about the installation across social media platforms is overwhelmingly negative. It’s baffling why Carew would want to make an installation at this school in the first place, seeing how filled it is with boring dicks.
I don’t wish to start a petition campaigning for “Rooted” to return, nor do I think it’s likely that will happen at all. The Krentzman Quad Loofahs will never come back, and they shouldn’t, because Northeastern is not deserving of them. The Cop drawing in the East Village basement will stay where it is, students on the way to class will refuse eye contact with one another, and we will live forever in darkness and pain, because this is the fate we chose for ourselves.
Madeleine Ungashick contributed reporting for this story.
Image Credit: Change.org petition
