Holding a palette smeared with colorful paint, Kiran Singh shouted to students passing by the Pollock Commons Cultural Lounge yesterday.

"What do you see in diversity?" Singh, Cultural Lounge coordinator, enthusiastically challenged the passersby.

Singh encouraged hesitant students to participate by painting portions of a canvas set up outside the lounge. The finished product will be a mural that will be hung, along with posters of prominent historical and civil rights figures, in the lounge.

"Because the commons is new, it's still kind of empty," Singh said.

In the upper left corner of the mural, John Gentile (junior-marketing) made a reproduction of three gods in one body.

"To me diversity means the exchange and meaning of cultures," he said. "It's an expansion of our horizons."

Gentile painted his representation of Buddha, the Christian god and an Egyptian god emerging from a merman-like body.

He also painted his idea of diversity through music lyrics.

"What's the time? It's time to get ill," Gentile wrote under his cartoon representation of the Beastie Boys.

He said the Beastie Boys are an example of bridging culture gaps.

"The Beastie Boys brought communities together via music," Gentile said. "Before the Beastie Boys, rap was primarily an African-American art."

Singh's co-worker Kristen Diorio crafted the border of the canvas with stick figures of different colors and sizes.

According to Singh, she had been discussing a cultural painting with Assistant Director of Residence Life John Hurst long before the incidents of racism that occurred at Beaver Hall last week.

"It's something that is interactive instead of sitting in a lecture hall and learning about diversity," she said. "Since the incident, more people are aware of the issues on campus. This way they can experience and express how they perceive diversity."

In reaction to the incidents, Meghan Gaffney (junior-journalism) painted two hands of different races clasping.

"This is something that will be hung in our commons and looked at for years," she said. "Despite the hot time that we [at Penn State] are experiencing, this mural will be a representation of the understanding that we do possess."

As Diorio painted, she dodged Brenden Bergquist (sophomore-animal bioscience) as he created a hand giving the peace sign.

"I think it describes diversity in my words: Peace amongst the people," he said.

Trevor Smith (sophomore-premedicine) contemplated his addition to the mural with friends before squirting green paint onto his palette.

"I'm painting a tree with a green trunk and different colored leaves," he said. "We all come from the same source, but we're expressed differently."