AMHERST, MASS. (WHDH) - UMass Amherst will celebrate the installation of a 12-foot segment of the Berlin Wall painted by famed French artist Thierry Noir on Tuesday afternoon.
The event will be held at 2 p.m. on the Memorial Hall patio. Sonja Kreibich, Consul General of Germany to the New England States, will join UMass President Marty Meehan, UMass Amherst Chancellor Kumble Subbaswamy and other campus officials for the celebration, which is the highlight of a week of art exhibitions and film screenings related to the structure’s history, impact and legacy.
Donated to the university by the family of Eric Hanson, the wall segment painted by Noir is titled “The Power of Creativity over Concrete.” In the 1980s, Noir, credited with being the first artist to paint the Berlin Wall, risked arrest by East German authorities for illicitly painting on the west side of the wall three meters beyond the western border.
Noir ultimately painted nearly six kilometers of the wall over the course of five years. UMass Amherst’s wall segment was originally painted in 1990 in front of an old print factory in the former southeast Berlin district of Treptow.
Hanson purchased the segment of the wall in 2010 with plans to create a traveling exhibit that aligned with his consumer products company. His vision was to transport the piece of the wall to various markets around the U.S. and eventually find a permanent home for it at a university. After Hanson died in 2018, his family decided to donate the segment to the UMass Amherst campus.
“The university is grateful to the family of Eric Hanson for the generous donation of this segment of the Berlin Wall,” Subbaswamy said in a statement. “For nearly 40 years, the wall stood as a cruel symbol of division — dissecting not only a city and a country, but families and entire societies — and its fall marked a joyous occasion of unification and the beginning of the end of the Cold War. This particular segment of the wall shows that inspiring art can be made amid terrible situations, and its presence at the heart of campus reflects UMass Amherst’s revolutionary spirit.”
The wall segment is being installed outside in an east/west direction — reflecting its placement in Germany — within a glass case next to Herter Hall, which is home to the history and German and Scandinavian studies academic departments and the DEFA Film Library.
Celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, DEFA is the only archive and research center outside of Germany devoted to filmmaking from and related to the former East Germany.
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