The sculpture on the front of the Nielsen Physics Building is Untitled, by UT faculty member Philip Nichols, the first sculptor appointed to the UT art faculty (1961). The sculpture is a welded steel relief placed in 1962, which is a dynamic abstraction of sharply joined planes that appear on one level to present a purely formal exercise of counterbalanced shapes and spaces. But Nichols was making an explicit, albeit symbolic, reference to the theme of physics in his sculpture.