The original penguin mural adoring John Bryan Community Pottery was painted just before July 4, 1976, following a design by then-17-year-old D.J. Schiff. Pictured are then-YSHS students Angela Harris (left) and Deidre Owen (nee McGee) in front of the freshly painted mural; the two were photographed by Schiff with his Kodak Instamatic. (Submitted photo)
‘Why not penguins?’ — Community Pottery mural turns 50
- Published: July 11, 2026
As the United States marks its semiquincentennial, Yellow Springs has another anniversary to observe: The days just before July 4 mark 50 years that the penguins adorning John Bryan Community Pottery have been staring into the middle distance.
Or, at least, a version of them has.
The original mural was designed in 1976 by then-17-year-old D.J. Schiff, now a Berkeley, California-based writer, cartoonist and James Joyce scholar. Speaking with the News last month, Schiff said that, at the time of the mural’s inception, he was a YS High School student, working at Elsewhere Books, spending free time at former music store Dingleberry’s. He was absorbing Dada, surrealism and the emerging punk movement as the village and the country at large prepared to celebrate the nation’s bicentennial.
“I was a hippie who instantly became a punk — so I was sort of a ‘pippie,’” he said.
From those established credentials, one might detect a dissonance with the idea of bicentennial pageantry — and one would be correct, according to Schiff.
“I was just a snarky punk 17-year-old,” he said with a laugh. “I was sort of saying ‘no’ to the bicentennial, you know — ‘We’ve just had Watergate, our president is corrupt and there’ll probably never be a more corrupt president in the history of the U.S.!’”
When his high school art teacher, Dorothy Zopf, asked students to propose a bicentennial mural, Schiff offered an absurdist, top-of-brain suggestion: “How about penguins?”
“And [Zopf] essentially said, ‘Well, yeah, sure, why not penguins — indeed, why not?’” Schiff said.
The mural, he said, was conceived in opposition to bicentennial boosterism. Its palette of black, white and cobalt blue managed two-thirds of the nation’s preferred color scheme — “And two out of three is nothing to sneeze at,” Schiff said — but offered neither flag nor soaring eagle. Instead, Schiff drew row upon row of vaguely expressionless penguins receding upward toward a vanishing point.
“They’re literally just chilling,” he said. “They’re not doing anything — they’re just existing, damn it.”
The design began as a small drawing, about 5 inches by 11 inches, shaped to match the long wall of the pottery building. The penguins were arranged in converging lines against a blue background that grew darker from the ground up, suggesting a vista that, theoretically, continued past the top of the JBCP building.
“[The penguins] went off, it was implied, to an infinite point,” Schiff said. “Of course, the building could only hold so much of infinity.”
To his recollection, Schiff and a group of friends got started on or around July 1, 1976, beginning with the blue background and continuing into the night, when they projected a slide of his drawing onto the building and traced the penguins in black. The group returned the next day to fill in the black and white forms, which Schiff estimated took about five hours. Having previously fallen from a ladder while working for Center Stage, he said he relied on some of his friends to ascend and bring the upper-level penguins to life.
He didn’t sign the mural or make much of his role in designing it, which was part and parcel of his approach; the work had been made with friends, and Schiff said he was skeptical of ego in art. Years later, when a local account credited the mural’s many painters alphabetically, Schiff’s name landed among the rest, making his authorship easy to miss.
Thus, the penguins went on to become known about town independent of their designer, and the pottery studio became, to many villagers, the “Penguin Building.”
“I didn’t know I was doing that,” Schiff said of creating a local landmark. “But I certainly did find out. … I don’t know what people understand [about the history of the penguins], but they love them.”
By 2015, the mural had faded enough that Schiff, by that time a longtime Californian, drew up a plan to repaint the lower penguins — the ones he could reach without a ladder — and add powdered mica for sheen. The upper penguins, he said, would have been left to fade into eventual obscurity atop their refreshed brethren. Alas, work conflicts, canceled vacations, and later, the COVID-19 pandemic kept that plan from coming to fruition.
Around 2020 or 2021, John Bryan Community Pottery Director Meg Smallwood told the News, the studio’s board asked her to redesign and repaint the mural, which had fallen into serious disrepair. Two designs were put to votes by studio members, students and the wider community, and volunteers joined Smallwood in painting the new version over the last two years.
The new mural retains three penguins, now standing among pieces of pottery beneath a cloudy blue sky. Each maintains its own distinct expression, and a yellow beam shines down near the center bird — the one that most closely resembles those in the original infinite colony.
“We adopted the penguins to be kind of our mascot, because they were so iconic,” Smallwood said. “The beam of light, honestly, was just kind of to highlight how much joy the studio brings … but the feedback I’ve gotten is that some people take it as symbolizing the spark of creative inspiration.”
Schiff, for his part, didn’t see a photo of the updated mural until it was sent to him by the News; he studied it and took inventory.
“Only three left,” he said. “If two is company, then three is a crowd.”
Schiff added that he’s happy the penguins still exist in something of an “airless void of absurdity,” and that they’re still “doing nothing.” He also pointed to the bittersweet notion that his original penguins — faded though they might have been — are still on the building, “just under a 64th of an inch of acrylic paint.”
“They’re still there,” he said. “That’s a legacy of sorts.”
And Smallwood, regaled this week with the history of the mural, was glad to learn of the context in which it was created.
“I really wanted to make sure the original creator’s idea was represented in at least some small way,” she said. “And now I have more to the story; people always ask me, ‘Why penguins?’ And now I can say, ‘Because why not?’”
Do you have stories or memories to share about the penguin mural? The News would love to hear them; send them to chuck@ysnews.com
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