Brown’s latest treasure hunt game started with CS classes and time spent in the SciLi. “I know she’s ugly,” Hadley McCormack ’27 says of the iconic Brutalist building, “but I think she deserves to be artistically represented.”
So last fall McCormack, a visual arts “and possibly computer science” concentrator, started painting it. “You look at her up close, and you’re like, ‘Wow, this is a monstrosity,’” she says. “But then, you know, you capture from a distance, and it’s golden hour, and she’s glowing. She’s pink, she’s orange, you know?”
Then, last spring, McCormack found packs of wooden coasters in her basement. “And I was like, these would be the cutest little canvases.”
Inspired by birbs, tiny crocheted birds that became a campus treasure-hunt craze in 2023, McCormack took to Sidechat, the popular social-media platform, to gauge interest in a birb-like treasure hunt for paintings of campus buildings. The post got 1.2K upvotes and @shittylittlepaintings.brown was born on Instagram. (Since then she’s taken the epithet out.)
Students started sharing their photos of favorite campus buildings for her to paint. “It gave me so much joy,” she says. “I got to see so many beautiful pictures of buildings that I’ve either never seen in that kind of light, or I’ve never seen at all. It was really cool to see how much people appreciated all these buildings, and how much that was reflected simply through the pictures that they took.”
McCormack started posting photos of her hand holding a painting that she’d hidden somewhere on campus. So far she’s done 40 and says she’ll “probably” continue. “I’m hoping to scatter a few around during the regular semester,” she says, “but I think my goal is to make it more regular during finals period, because, like, that’s when I lose the structure of classes, and so I have a little more time to paint. And by paint, I mean procrastinate by painting.”
And, she adds, it’s a good time to cheer people up. “I think that’s also the time when people need, like, a little painting the most.”