A 100-foot mural stretching across the walls of the University of Michigan's new College of Pharmacy building gives Ann Arbor a campus landmark that is part art, part living archive.

Detroit artist Ellen Rutt created the mixed-media piece, titled "InterActions," to tell the college's story in warm earth tones, archival photographs and small canvases that can be swapped out as new milestones arrive. The work went on public display when the university held a formal grand opening for the building on Friday, Aug. 28, drawing close to 700 people for a ribbon-cutting, tours and a reception.

Rutt, a University of Michigan Stamps School of Art and Design alumna with more than a decade of public-art experience, according to her portfolio, said she spent months consulting pharmacy faculty and staff and digging through records at the Bentley Historical Library. She described her role as amplifying what the college had already accomplished.

"I am sort of being a magnifying glass for things that they've already done, quite literally with a magnifying glass," Rutt told University of Michigan News.

The mural's palette draws from covers of the college's former publication, also called InterActions. Scattered across the 100-foot span are archival images on individual canvases showing key researchers, celebratory milestones and medicinal plants. One canvas features a Gila monster named Pebbles that received care at the college last year.

Those canvases are built to be replaced. Rutt said she wants future students to feel free to update the work as new discoveries happen, adding that "… not all art needs to last forever."

The building at the corner of Huron Street and Glen Avenue is the university's first mass-timber academic building. University of Michigan regents approved the $141 million project in 2022. At 142,000 square feet, it holds open-concept study spaces and active-learning classrooms for the college's roughly 800 students, 70 faculty and more than 100 staff. The structure reduces embodied carbon by about 40% compared to a conventional steel-and-concrete research building, according to Shalanda Baker, vice provost for sustainability and climate action.

Dean Vicki Ellingrod said the mural is meant to invite the broader community into the pharmacy profession. She said art creates dialogue and that the college wanted to give people on campus a way to engage with its work.

The project was donor-funded through the college's Interior Experience and Preservation Fund and completed in collaboration with the university's President's Advisory Committee on Public Art (PAConPA) and the Arts Initiative's Creators on Campus program.

The building had already opened for classes earlier in 2026 before the Aug. 28 ceremony. Residents can visit the mural and the building's public spaces at Huron Street and Glen Avenue.