Of the many memorable outdoor spots at the University of Connecticut’s Storrs campus, few are as popular and inviting as Horsebarn Hill. The landscape offers a scenic overlook of the campus, nearby ice cream at the Dairy Bar, easy access to the Fenton Tract forest area and farm animals galore.
Something less visible, however, is the abundance of history brimming within the area and how the hill has changed over time. But an ongoing exhibition at the William Benton Museum of Art, “Raid the Archive: New Eyes on Horsebarn Hill,” is making the hill’s past more apparent.
The exhibition showcases artwork by UConn MFA students inspired by Horsebarn Hill-related materials from the university’s Archives and Special Collections. The students also curated artifacts from the archives that were put on display alongside their artwork. According to the Benton’s website, the exhibition was made available to the public on Jan. 20.
Avery Nielsen-Webb, a second-semester MFA student who specializes in photography, was one of the students featured in the exhibition. He said the project was the result of a class led by art professor Janet Pritchard in the fall 2025 semester.
The class met once a week for three hours and included the entire cohort of five MFA students in their first semester and two MFA students in their third semester, Nielsen-Webb said. The process of poring through the archives to find information about Horsebarn Hill took a lot of time, but since his practice focuses on where research and environmentalism intersect art, Nielsen-Webb said the project worked with his artistic interests.
“I felt very comfortable doing this project,” Nielsen-Webb said. “I know for some people it’s more of, like, an artistic project, but for me it was more of bringing history into art with a little bit of science.”
Nielsen-Webb’s piece is one of the first on display upon entering the exhibition. At first, it may just look like a large, gray tapestry with a series of numbers filling the space. But it is actually the written out values of each colored pixel of an archival picture. In the photo, Albert E. Moss, who taught at UConn in the early 1900s, is adding a dam to the Fenton River, Nielsen-Webb said.
“Archivists are like, ‘You can’t steal any of these items or they’re going to get copyrighted,’ and I was like, ‘Watch me,” Nielsen-Webb said. “So basically, I did steal it pixel by pixel but I completely reinvented it.”
Nielsen-Webb said he took into account the photo’s original context and wanted to make parallels between dams and archives that “some people can access, some people can’t access.” He also said he was “relating code and data to more of a flow, kind of like a river.”
The artwork component was a helpful stepping stone for other projects in progress about forests that use data centers, Nielsen-Webb said. For his curated archival materials, which each student had their own section for, with a description they wrote, he selected photos of work being done to the Fenton River.
On an adjacent wall in the exhibit, a very different scene plays out with the archival materials. Photos of students posing with cows sit on the wall while glass milk bottles, a UConn Dairy Club T-shirt and other cow-related memorabilia rest in a glass case. Second-semester MFA student Alex Heard, who focuses on sculpture, curated the cow-related materials, called their area the “cow corner.”
“It was like as many things as I could find with cows on them that felt kind of both aesthetically and conceptually consistent with the word, just pile it in,” Heard said. “The idea of the show being a ‘raid the archive’ situation where we’re more or less open to take as much or as little from the archive and present it in this kind of new context was pretty exciting because you could kind of just keep going.”
Heard, who lived in Ohio before coming to UConn, said they were not familiar with Horsebarn Hill before the project. They said that when they familiarized themself with the hill before the archival research process, the cows and other organisms were captivating.
“The things that I latched onto the most was that sort of decision to seek out magic that was surrounding us if we so chose to and sort of zeroing in on that resolution of fauna,” Heard said. “And then the kind of greater landscape of the like hill, thinking about the sky, the ground and then everything that happens between those things.”
Heard’s piece, titled “Landscape with Cow,” explores this idea in the form of a vertical sculpture with three main parts. At the bottom is a mound of soft materials in the shape of many four-leaf clovers. Above it is a black-and-white cow print pattern, and even higher is a blue and white cow print pattern that represents the sky. Heard connected all three components with a stick they found on the hill.
“It is meant to be sort of referencing the idea of an abstract painting crossed with a landscape painting in the form of a sculpture,” Heard said. “So it’s sort of like a sign post, a map, a protest sign, all coalescing in art that looks like a cow.”
Heard said they were inspired by archival newspapers, some of which are on display, that covered protests in 1999 against plans to construct a Pfizer research facility on Horsebarn Hill.
The other second-semester MFA students had different approaches to their art. McKayla Bensheimer made an Indigenous American-inspired quilt, while Kate Greenwell created two stacks of handmade paper — one with the word “here,” the other with the word, “there” — that could be taken by visitors. Bahar Ejtemaei made a series of black-and-white acrylic paintings depicting sustained life when the Farwell House, which used to be near the Jacobson Barn, burned down in 1976.
Shuning Wang, one of the second-year MFA students featured in the exhibition, said she went into the project with an already-established appreciation for Horsebarn Hill.
“In this project, I was inspired by just standing on the top of the hill, feeling the wind and thinking back into the archival materials we’d read,” Wang said. “And it inspired me, feels like a story is flipping the book pages itself within the wind.”
Wang captured the movement of the wind by photographing a piece of paper held in the air while at the top of the hill. She then made her own paper — something she said she enjoys because of how paper’s flexibility and fragility relate to human beings — that mimicked the pattern. Old newspapers were used to make the paper material, Wang said, and some cutouts were visible in her project.
“While making the process, I also reprint some of the archival material and have it half-shown on the paper,” Wang said. “So the paper pop on that gives me a layer of time that I’m feeling during this project.”
Rosely Htoo, the other second-year MFA student in the exhibition, said the program was a helpful opportunity to combine her interests in photography, maps and making books.
“I was looking at a lot of [maps] and then someone was telling me about the topography, and I was like, ‘I love that,’” Htoo said. “While doing the research I noticed the elevation changed throughout the years. I was like, this is interesting, that little change in the number.”
Htoo ended up making a book that sets the contour lines of the hill alongside photographs of fingerprint markings, which look similar next to each other. She said juxtaposing contour lines with fingerprint markings shows a shared sense of identity.
“We were talking about identity, right?” Htoo said. “Like how a landscape has an identity, but also how we are identified with that landscape. But then our fingerprint carries our identity, right? So it’s making that connection of identity within identity within identity.”
Htoo also said the program was the first time she practiced making wooden frames, which she used for the large topography maps on display.
The students said that despite working in different mediums, the project was collaborative, especially when they were looking through the archives. They also said they spent a lot of time coordinating with archivists and Benton curators to ensure the research and exhibition phases of the project went smoothly.
“This was a great opportunity for us as burgeoning professionals to interface with a venue like a museum where they’re going to handle the objects in a much more litigious way than any given pop-up gallery,” Heard said.
According to the Benton website, the exhibit will remain open until Aug. 2. The website also lists the Benton’s open hours and any upcoming events ran in conjunction with “Raid the Archive: New Eyes on Horsebarn Hill.”