It wasn’t April Fools—just mischief that shaped USF’s early campus trees

By Paul Guzzo, University Communications and Marketing

The landscaping around the University of South Florida's Fine Arts Building is neat and organized - trees planted in straight rows along the sidewalks in a grid formation.

But outside the adjacent Contemporary Art Museum, a small cluster of trees breaks formation - zigzagging unexpectedly away from the sidewalk.

Hard to spot at first, but once noticed, impossible to ignore.

It looks like an error or natural growth - maybe even a long-ago prank - but it's neither.

It's art.

The pattern is a spontaneous installation its creators never imagined would survive.

As the story goes, six decades ago, students quietly shifted flags marking where the trees were supposed to be planted. The landscaping crew followed the markers exactly.

To many observers, the tale has all the ingredients of an April Fools' stunt. But the students behind it were firm: this wasn't mischief. It was intention - a living installation by USF's charter class, a subtle disruption woven directly into the emerging campus.

Today, as USF celebrates its 70th anniversary, those trees still stand as a quiet monument to the university's earliest creative spirit.

"It was an aesthetic decision," said Robert Stackhouse, an internationally renowned artist and member of USF's charter class who participated in the activity. "We were advanced arts students and very protective of our building. We didn't want our building's landscaping to look exactly like everywhere else. We wanted it to be unique, like us. And now it's part of USF history."

A campus finding its shape

When USF opened to students in 1960, the campus looked less like a university and more like a desert mirage - three buildings, lots of sand, almost no sidewalks and just scattered trees.

Art students didn't have their own space. Instead, during USF's inaugural year, they used classrooms in the Administration Building and were without dedicated studios or performance venues.

The following year, when Harrison Covington was named chairman of the Department of Art, he moved them into the basement of the student center.

"We were in a windowless basement, right next to the ping pong table and billiards room," Stackhouse said with a laugh.

Construction of the Fine Arts Building began in 1962 as part of USF's first major expansion. It opened in June 1964, giving the campus's most colorful students a long-overdue place of their own.

"Years later, Harrison told me that the artists, thespians and musicians were our football team back then," Stackhouse said. "We didn't have any sports, but our productions and art shows brought people to campus and kept us in the news."

And at the time, Covington mimicked a hard-nosed football coach.

"We loved him, but he was a disciplinarian," Stackhouse said. "He always scheduled master painting classes at 8 a.m."

The tree-planting episode was made possible largely by circumstance.

When access meant possibility

Artist-in-residence and abstract painter Friedel Dzubas was given studio space inside the new facility.

"We never would have been in any position to move the flags without that studio created just for him," Stackhouse said.

When Dzubas' residency ended, Stackhouse was allowed to use the same space for a three-month term - giving him and his friends rare after-hours access to a building and grounds still taking shape.

"They figured someone might as well make use of it," Stackhouse said. "It was on the northeast corner of the arts building. My friends would come in to hang out, and we'd listen to Miles Davis' 'Sketches of Spain' over and over again."

Meanwhile, it was at that time, according to the USF Library's Special Collections records, that the university began sprucing up campus with a major landscaping push that transplanted mature magnolias, oaks and cedars around keyacademic areas, including the Fine Arts Building.

"One night, my friends showed up and said that flags had been placed on either side of the walkways, noting where they would plant trees," Stackhouse said. "We went outside to look and someone said something like we didn't want trees in a boring row leading up to the arts building. So, we picked up the flags and placed them haphazardly. It was our art project for the night. We wanted it to look more natural. Consider it an artistic intervention."

When Stackhouse graduated in the fall of 1965, the flags were still waiting to be replaced by trees. Once they were, as the mismatch became more noticeable, it was assumed the trees were naturally growing rather than transplanted - as was the students' intention.

From playful act to permanent mark

Stackhouse went on to earn a master's degree from the University of Maryland and display paintings and sculptures in art museums throughout the United States and internationally before returning to USF for an exhibition of his work in 1981 and another in 1992.

It was during that second one that Covington, who had since heard of the flag prank from other graduates, pointed out the trees to Stackhouse.

"I was certainly surprised," Stackhouse said with a laugh. "I remember once writing my name between some bricks as a student, thinking I could come back one day and find it - a little legacy. That didn't work out, but the trees did."

Stackhouse also said that Covington told him the trees had influenced the planned footprint of the neighboring Contemporary Art Museum, which opened in 1989 - prompting architects to adjust the building's placement rather than remove the trees.

A late-night act of spontaneous artistic expression may have quietly shaped one of USF's signature buildings.

"I guess the architects looked at those randomly placed oak trees and said that because they were natural growth, they shouldn't cut them down," Stackhouse said. "Instead, they designed the museum around them. I remember saying, 'Wow, I didn't realize we'd done something that monumental.'"

Campus lore confirmed

The museum's architect, Peter Gottschalk, said he can't recall whether trees impacted his work, so that part of the story might be forever unsubstantiated, even if true.

But the relocation of the flags has been verified by others.

Peter Foe, who studied photography at USF from 1972 to 1976, said one of his instructors, Jim Oliver, told him he participated in the flag-moving and tree-planting.

"I know that I had heard the story from a couple of other sources during my time at USF too," said Foe, who also worked at USF's Contemporary Art Museum for more than 20 years. "It's accurate."

And Kristin Soderqvist, who has been at USF for more than 40 years - first as an arts student and now as director of sales and marketing for Graphicstudio - said she's heard it from a number of Stackhouse's former classmates who recall when it happened.

"When you are walking across campus, do you ever notice the perfectly manicured landscaping?" Soderqvist said. "Every tree in a perfect line, crepe myrtles in happy rows, palm trees standing at attention, until you get to the Fine Arts Building. Some of the oldest oaks on campus seem out of place, a bit haphazard. Well, you can thank the artist Robert Stackhouse and his friends."

It's a reminder that sometimes art doesn't hang on a wall. Sometimes, it takes root.