If you stand on the far end of the Central Gallery at the Yale Peabody Museum, you might catch a green-hued glimpse into the past — and future — of biodiversity.
A new mural installed in the gallery, “Temporal Portal,” collapses millions of years of plant and evolution into a cave scene nested within a wall arch. Ancient species like the trilobite and calamites, a genus of extinct horsetails, occupy the foreground in dark hues. Further back, existing species like the elm tree stand in lighter green.
The mural also looks into the future with imaginary plant and animal species painted in dotted outlines — the creative contribution of Peabody staff and New Haven residents, who came together during a recent Community Day at the museum to contribute to the mural.
“Temporal Portal” was the culmination of the Yale College fall semester course “Cave Paintings to Graffiti,” taught by Kymberly Pinder, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Dean of the Yale School of Art. The course walked students through thousands of years of mural painting history, moving from the ancient Lascaux cave paintings in France to present-day graffiti as they explored themes of accessibility and ownership in public art.
The mural depicts a scene lush with extinct and existing species alike — several with ties to Yale’s home state. Elm trees form a dense archway in the background, recalling a time before Dutch elm disease nearly wiped out the species in the mid-20th century.
Informed by these studies, the class collaborated with Irisol González-Vega ’24 M.F.A., a New Haven-based studio artist and muralist, and Sok Song, a graduate student in the School of Art who served as teaching assistant for the class, to design, propose, and install “Temporal Portal” in the Peabody.
The process, said Pinder, was intended to help students build “collaborative muscle,” useful both within and beyond the art world, and to encourage them to take note of the art all around them — including the “things in their own community that they may have just rushed by.”
“Murals are there for anyone,” Pinder said. “Many galleries and museums are free, but people still think, ‘I don’t belong there.’ That’s what I love about murals — they make people feel a sense of access and ownership.”
Viewing “Temporal Portal” should “transport” viewers to different places and times, said Gaya Buchta, a Yale junior born in Sweden and raised in Rhode Island who is majoring in studio art — just as walking through the Peabody does.
“The Peabody is a portal to all these other worlds,” Buchta said. “It can also be a portal to an imaginary future.”
From mural history to collaborative practice
In the late ’90s, Pinder was teaching classes on mural history at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The elementary school her children attended was housed in an old building with bare, white walls. “The principal asked if my students could paint murals on them,” Pinder said.
The project, Pinder said, was a “fun,” hands-on way for her students to put their historical knowledge into practice — one she decided to fold into future versions of her class.
The mural also pays homage to the biodiversity of species currently on display at the Peabody. For example, a Postman butterfly, around 30 of which reside in the Peabody’s Living Lab, flits across the mural — its flight path close to the dotted outline of a future species imagined by New Haven residents.
To walk students through the logistical and creative steps of mural-making, Pinder partners with a local muralist. For “Cave Paintings to Graffiti,” she enlisted González-Vega, who has a studio practice in New Haven but is also an experienced muralist whose public art has been featured in her hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina, as well as elsewhere.
Gonzalez’s expertise helped the class as they prepared to install their mural in the Peabody, a space with its own rich history of public art that aims to make science accessible — and visually captivating — for the public.
“Art helps us to imagine and understand environments, species, and phenomena we don’t have direct access to,” said Kailen Rogers, associate director of exhibitions at the Peabody. “The storytelling in our murals exemplifies the Peabody’s mission: to advance understanding of the world and our place within it.”
Perhaps best known among the Peabody’s murals is “The Age of Reptiles,” completed by artist Rudolph F. Zallinger in 1947. Spanning the east wall of the Burke Hall of Dinosaurs, the mural depicts the evolution of dinosaur and plant life across 319 million years. (Zallinger also painted the museum’s mural “The Age of Mammals,” completed in 1967.)
“There’s a parallel between our mural and [‘The Age of Reptiles’],” said Buchta. “They’re both journeys through time, represented by the species that would have been there at that day.”
The Peabody houses the most complete dinosaur skeleton discovered in Connecticut: Anchisaurus. Two of these long-necked sauropods walk together at bottom left.
Early in the fall, the class traveled to New York for inspiration, viewing the Art Deco murals of the Rockefeller Center and “Manhattan,” Josef Albers’ mural in the lobby of the MetLife Building. They also toured the many murals of New Haven, including the cooling-paint mural in Dixwell that was made in 2024 as part of the Yale Planetary Solutions’ Public Art as Urban Climate Solutions initiative.
To create a mural that fit the Peabody’s needs, the class split into small design groups that drafted a mural design and then pitched their proposal to a panel of museum staff — a step that encouraged them to think about how the public would interact with their work and the need to create a mural that balanced beauty, scientific accuracy, and accessibility.
The Peabody staff selected the design proposed by Buchta and her classmates Yvonne Kim and Hope Applegate, who were inspired by the Central Gallery’s abundance of doorways — a motif that led them to the idea of a portal.
“The Peabody’s collections are like portals into a different timeline. The mural collapses all those timelines into one — like a doorway where we’re looking into another world,” said Kim, a Yale senior from Utah majoring in neuroscience.
On Community Day, Yale students, New Haven residents, and Peabody staff came together to paint a trilobite in the style of the nearly 20,000-year-old Lascaux cave paintings in France — an ancient form of mural-making. The Peabody houses many trilobites from Beecher’s Trilobite Bed, a quarry in New York where remarkably well-preserved fossils can be found in shale.
They also chose colors for the mural, layers of green, that turn “Temporal Portal” into a kind of optical illusion. When you stand far from the mural, it blends into the stand of plants in front of it — living relatives of the plant fossils shown in a display case next to the mural — as if the plants and mural occupy the same, green-hued world.
Later, the class plans to integrate the silhouette of a parent and child into the mural — symbolic of the visitors who might be viewing it, and a nod to the Peabody’s commitment to public engagement.
Since the equipment necessary to reach the high space was only available for a limited time, the class first painted the mural on a large piece of polytab cloth, also known as parachute cloth, and transported it to the museum, a speedier method than painting on the wall. It was then installed in panels using gesso, a primer that can act as a strong adhesive.
“There’s a lot of steps that go into the process that I wouldn’t have thought about before. It takes a lot of precision and patience,” said Skyla Kirton, a first-year Yale student from New York. “I’m in awe of the artists who create these.”
Imagining a biodiverse future together
Midway through the installation process, in a classroom off the Central Gallery, staff at the Peabody and other members of the New Haven community gathered for a Community Day organized by Pinder’s students. The class passed around surveys that asked participants to imagine a future species.
During the Community Day gathering, students in the mural-making class joined New Haven residents during a session to imagine species that might inhabit the Earth in the future.
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Adults and children used watercolors to paint their answers on the surveys, drawing inspiration from the species already depicted in the mural.
“With evolution, new things are going to keep being made,” Kirton said. “[In the mural,] we get to see how people who look at the Peabody’s exhibits internalize them, and how it inspires them to create something new.”
In another corner of the room others, including Pinder, rolled up their sleeves to fill in the top and bottom parachute-cloth panels of the mural, paint-by-number style.
Days later, the class voted on their top three imaginary species. They then painted the species into the mural as dotted line silhouettes.
The event was a result of Pinder’s request that students find a way to engage members of the New Haven community since, in her words, “you’re creating something that they have to live with.”
Red garnets, Connecticut’s state mineral, stud the cave ceiling. On Community Day, Gaya Buchta, a Yale junior majoring in studio art, helped paint the garnets into the mural.
“The whole idea is to think beyond this moment, not only in terms of what’s depicted in the mural, but also in general,” González-Vega, who builds community engagement into her own mural-making process, said. “[The mural] can take you in different directions.”
During the Peabody’s recent Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration, New Haven resident Lily Reyes stopped with her children for a few moments in the Central Gallery, where they took in the new mural. “I love it,” she said. “[The mural] brings a form of peace and tranquility.”
