A Mural to Celebrate 50 Years of Biddle Music

In late August, visual artist Natalie Robinson took a short break from the mural she was creating in the lobby of Duke University’s Mary Biddle Duke Music Building.

Just days from completion, Robinson’s work honors the namesake of the Mary Duke Biddle Music Building and the legendary jazz artist, Mary Lou Williams, Duke’s first artist-in-residence.

The brightly colored mural in the pale brick Georgian building was commissioned by a committee of Duke Music Department faculty members to highlight the 50th anniversary of its opening in the fall of 1974.

Robinson, a 23-year-old Greensboro native, was outfitted in white coveralls decorated with splotches and smears of brightly colored acrylic paints.

Surrounded by a rush of paint cans, brushes and tape, she stood on metal scaffolding in the music building lobby and surveyed her nearly completed work -- a visual celebration of the two Marys and the historic, half-century old building.

Mary Duke Biddle was the granddaughter of Washington Duke, a graduate of Trinity College in 1907, and an ardent patron of the arts who in 1956, established the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation, which contributed more than $650,000 toward the construction of the music building.

Mary Lou Williams was an acclaimed and highly influential jazz pianist and composer who was influenced by the pioneering pianists,  Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe “Jelly” Roll Morton, Thomas Wright “Fats” Waller and Earl “Fatha” Hines. Williams played with the art form’s greatest artists, including Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong, Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington, and Benny Goodman, and served as a mentor for bebop pioneers Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Sphere Monk and Charlie Parker.

Verena Mösenbichler-Bryant

One of the mural committee members, Verena Mösenbichler-Bryant, chairs the music department, and serves as a professor of the practice of music.

Mösenbichler-Bryant said the faculty members had long discussions on how to celebrate the building’s anniversary.

“It’s a really important milestone that coincides with the centennial, so it was important to mark this important occasion and to somehow capture how the department has grown over the last few years,” said Mösenbichler-Bryant, who also directs the Duke University Wind Symphony, and is the artistic director and conductor of the Durham Medical Orchestra.

Mösenbichler-Bryant added that the music department considered other artists who could capture the history of the music department and worked closely with several of them before choosing Robinson for the project.

“Her work was inspiring,” she said. “It really captured our intentions, and it was so beautiful, and how she combined it into one beautiful artwork.”

The building’s foyer features a turn of the century portrait of Mary Duke Biddle that’s replicated by Robinson in her mural. The whimsical, colorful work was also inspired in part by a Mary Lou Williams’ drawing titled, “History of Jazz.”

The mural begins with Morton, Waller and Hines, who inspired Williams before it segues into the figures of her contemporaries, Armstrong, Ellington and Goodman, who were also sources of inspiration for her.

Natalie Robinson at work in the Biddle Building.
Natalie Robinson at work in the Biddle Building.
A detail from the mural
A mural detail. The flowers are painted in the same colors as Mary Lou Williams’ musical inspirations.

There’s a twisting, brown vine throughout the work, and flowers painted in the same colors as Williams’ musical inspirations that speaks to connectivity, growth and love.

Williams is seated at the piano with the notes from her composition, “What’s Your Story Morning Glory,” flowing behind her. 

Robinson is a graduate of the University of North Carolina-Greensboro. Her work has been featured across the state, and in Brooklyn, Miami, Chicago, Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C. She is “absolutely honored” to create art that commemorates the building’s half-century mark. 

The work has added significance because her father, Michael Robinson, a recently retired physician, attended Duke’s medical school.

“I hope this piece really inspires others to chase their dreams and accomplish whatever it is they want to do,” Robinson said. “And it’s also a special tribute to my dad, because he graduated from here and he pursued medicine. So to have this contrast of the arts and science is a beautiful thing.”

Natalie Robinson in front of her mural
Biddle Building mural artist Natalie Robinson.

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