North Academic Commons
Welcoming students to their next chapter at CWU
By Rune Torgersen
This fall, the latest addition to Central Washington University’s campus opened its doors to the public for the very first time, inviting students, faculty, and staff to explore all that the new academic facility has to offer.
The North Academic Commons (NAC), a 104,200-square-foot project three years in the making, is now home to the departments of History, Political Science, Law and Justice, Sociology, English, Philosophy, and World Languages and Cultures, all of which were previously housed in the now-demolished Farrell Hall and Language and Literature building.
The NAC features the largest lecture hall on campus, modeled after the internationally-renowned TED Talks series of lectures. The 240-seat space will play host to a broad variety of programming in the coming years, both academic and extracurricular, and exemplifies the building’s focus on shared learning and lifelong connections.
CWU Director of Capital Planning and Projects Delano Palmer has delighted in showing off the NAC as it came together over the course of the last two years, and he knows that it will be home to interactions that will come to define many students’ time at Central.
“I loved giving tours of the building at every stage of construction, and getting to educate people on how it will serve our campus for years to come,” Palmer said. “Building something that students will have life-defining experiences in, meet friends and loved ones they’ll cherish for the rest of their lives, that’s what gets me excited about the work I do, and about the NAC. We didn’t do this for ourselves, but for all the future students who will call this building home.”
The building’s natural light-filled atrium features a wall of laminated wood sourced from Yakama Forestry Products, lending the space a warm, welcoming glow as it invites students into their studies. The space is decorated by a four-story-tall art installation by artist RYAN! Elizabeth Feddersen, entitled Collective Conscience.
Feddersen’s work is also featured in the space near the building’s mock courtroom, which will serve as a crucial piece of Law and Justice students’ education. The courtroom provides a substantial upgrade over the previous facility in Farrell Hall, contributing to students’ ability to visualize themselves in a genuine court of law.
“I’m excited to see how Mock Trial Club will be able to utilize the new, larger space,” said Serenity Hendricks, a Law and Justice major who plays an active role in the high-performing club. “We’ll be able to work more on our projection and vocalization, as a bigger space has an impact on how we need to present ourselves. We’ll really be able to show it off at the invitational we’re hosting in January, too.”
The NAC was designed from the ground up to meet the requirements for a Gold certification from Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED), a globally-recognized approach to highlighting sustainable building practices. Beyond the state-of-the-art design’s ability to harness natural light, the NAC will be the first building at CWU to be heated and cooled exclusively using geothermal energy, thanks to the newly-constructed GeoEco Plant just across the road.
CWU Sustainability Director Jeff Bousson is eager to see the project come together, a landmark step toward fulfilling the promise of CWU’s Climate Action Plan.
“It’s a really exciting project that enables CWU to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, and supports the objectives listed in our Climate Action Plan,” he said. “It’s also the first of many projects to come, all of which will benefit us both economically and environmentally.”
The GeoEco plant, which exchanges heat with Ellensburg’s underground aquifer using an open-loop pump system, eliminates the role of fossil fuels and coolants in regulating the temperature of the building. It’s designed to provide that same service to even more CWU buildings over time, as part of a planned network of such facilities across campus.
“I hope all the alumni reading this stay tuned, and know that their alma mater is doing something that no one else in the state is doing,” Palmer said. “We’re doing the work that moves the world forward, because that’s our job as a school.”
CWU employees watch the installation of artwork Collective Conscience in the NAC.
Meet the Artist
RYAN! Elizabeth Feddersen. Photo: Ash Frantz
RYAN! Elizabeth Feddersen has been designing and executing works of public and interactive art for over a decade now.
In September of 2023, Feddersen hosted the exhibit Signal Traces at CWU’s Sarah Spurgeon Gallery, and found an opportunity to bring her art closer to home in a more permanent way.
“I had been really interested in finding an opportunity to make work in Central Washington, since I’m originally from Wenatchee and have been living on the coast side for about 20 years now,” said Feddersen, who is also an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation from the Okanogan and Arrow Lakes bands. “During the reception at the show in Sarah Spurgeon, a staff member mentioned that there might be a public art project coming up, and to keep an eye out.”
When the call went out looking for artists to help decorate the new NAC space on campus, Feddersen saw an opportunity to ply a trade she has spent a lifetime developing.
"My work has often incorporated and referenced plateau culture through this contemporary lens, looking at how we got to where we are,” she said. “Growing up in the interior Salish territory with that cultural background has shaped the work that I make.”
After graduating from Cornish College of the Arts in 2009, Feddersen realized that her passion lies in creating art that’s easily accessible by people from all walks of life.
“Part of what drew me to it was the work being made for the public, not just for collectors,” she said. “Whether it’s in public art or as an interactive work in a museum or gallery, it’s never going to go and live in someone’s storage unit.”
For the artwork adorning the NAC, Collective Conscience and Deliberate, Feddersen met with the faculty and staff who would go on to occupy the building, merging her own artistic process with what she knew the space would become.
“For these pieces, I got to meet with stakeholders from a variety of the departments that will be housed in the North Academic Commons, and a lot of the work stems from those conversations. There’s some references to plateau pictorial beadwork in there, but the content of it is deeply site-specific to this community.”
Collective Conscience is a four-story-tall mural depicting a larger-than-life figure with an open mouth, scattering symbology across the wall it occupies. Feddersen sees the work as a reflection of how our expression as humans comes to shape our surroundings, and vice versa.
“The symbols are different types of communication, representing all the things we communicate with each other and how they become part of humanity once we express them into the world,” she said. “The figure is both creating our collective conscious, but also that collective conscious is coalescing into a person.”
Deliberate, which is featured on a wall near the mock courtroom, depicts the animal and plant people of plateau lore in a trial setting with human figures. The work plays into the purpose of the space while playfully interrogating the history of the land upon which it sits.
“It’s about how we evaluate and decide on how we want to impact other people, animals, plants, and the land itself,” Feddersen said. “It invites the viewer to think about the story we’re telling and the world we’re creating.”
While the art was created with serious intent and messaging aforethought, Feddersen often approaches these subject matters from a place of levity and curiosity, lending the finished works a depth best enjoyed several times over.
“I try to keep an element of humor in my work,” she said. “While the subject might be serious, they’re also aesthetically lighthearted, and full of little jokes and Easter eggs. My goal is to have there be enough to pick up on that there are new things to see on multiple viewings.”
Ultimately, Feddersen’s goal was to draw a connection between the disparate programs housed in the NAC and the people who will occupy it for many years to come.
“I was thinking a lot about how what we think of as humanity is a combination of our thoughts, our actions, and our beliefs, and how that’s shaped by the stories we tell and the stories we hear,” she said. “The humanities are very centered on stories and communication, and how we share our perceptions of the world.”