Franklin D. Roosevelt’s campaign promise of 1932 — “a new deal for the American people” — took shape after his inauguration as president in March 1933.  With Congressional support, dozens of new programs were created to employ people, restore morale, and rebuild an economy decimated by the Great Depression. Funding became available for a multitude of infrastructure projects — highways, dams, water systems, parks, land conservation — as well as the institutions of everyday life, like post offices, schools, libraries, and recreation centers. New hospitals and clinics were built to expand access to medical care and improve public health. Millions of Americans were hired to design, build, and staff these facilities.

For the first time in the country’s history, organized funding was directed to the arts and humanities. Legions of writers, historians, musicians, dancers, and actors were employed to use their skills to enlighten or entertain the public. Under the umbrella of the Works Progress Administration, the largest New Deal agency, the Federal Art Project alone hired some 10,000 artists between 1935 and 1943. Painters, sculptors, graphic artists, photographers, textile designers, and other craftspeople created work for placement in or around public buildings and taught free classes in newly built community art centers. New York-based artists also collaborated with other New Deal programs, designing sets for the Federal Theater Project or posters for the city’s Health Department.

Perhaps most famously — and certainly most enduringly — mural projects were commissioned for a variety of New York public spaces, including armories, public housing, schools, courts, jails, airports, borough halls, the U.S. Customs House, and Ellis Island. Among the chief beneficiaries of mural assignments were eighteen of the city’s public hospitals. For eight years, dozens of artists and their assistants were busy painting murals to enlighten, inspire, and comfort patients, staff, and visitors. The murals celebrated the evolution of medicine from primitive origins to modern science, amused pediatric patients with illustrations of fairy tales, documented American history, and even introduced the public to abstract art. Some murals have been lost over time, but during the last thirty years, New York City Heath + Hospitals Arts in Medicine has made a concerted effort to document and restore surviving work, and also to commission new murals. This exhibition focuses on six historic, New Deal hospital mural projects – now restored for public viewing – that are representative in style and content of all that were created for the hospitals and medical services funded by the New Deal.

Roosevelt House is very grateful for the loan of the original Abram Champanier mural panels from the collection of NYC Health + Hospitals managed by Larissa Trinder, Senior Director NYC Health + Hospitals Arts in Medicine. For resources provided in digital format we thank: Donna Pagano, Staten Island Museum; Julianna Monjeau, NYC Public Design Commission; Ken Cobb, Municipal Archives, City of New York; and Rick Luftglass, Executive Director Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund. The exhibition was curated by Roosevelt House Historian Deborah Gardner and designed by Roosevelt House staff Daniel Culkin and Aaron Fineman. For additional assistance we thank historian Bert Hansen, Jan Rothschild, and Barbara Haskell, Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art. Special thanks for exhibition support from the Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund.

New York Health In The New Deal

New York’s first public hospital was founded in the 18^th century — which later became Bellevue — laying the foundation for 200 years of care and innovation. From the mid-19^th into the 20^thcenturies, research and more scientific standards of medical practice care provided New Yorkers with vaccinations, contagious disease

control, and care for the chronically ill, and improvements in sanitation and the water supply also contributed to a healthier city. By the 1930s there were about 23 municipal public hospitals in New York, including some small local extension units. Always functioning as a safety net for the poor, they would greatly expand their capacity during the Depression, serving a more economically diverse population as fewer people could even afford the voluntary (nonprofit) hospitals or pay for private doctors whose numbers declined as patients dwindled.  The newly organized (1929) Department of Hospitals united all municipal hospitals and ambulance services, and a new psychiatric division in time to cope with the stresses of the Great Depression, and take advantage of the resources offered by the New Deal. Commissioner Dr. Sigismund S. Goldwater played a prominent role in negotiating for funding – in which he was greatly assisted by New York’s popular Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia — and promoting the city’s services, declaring on WNYC radio, “When you think of the Department of Hospitals, remember this — the City of New York is itself interested in every sick person who needs hospital care and who cannot afford to pay for it.” The Department’s outreach for public health campaigns deployed printed materials to reach a wide audience. Public health campaigns widely disseminated information about nutrition, child care, vaccination, treatment, and medical care. These stressed early diagnosis, treatment, and testing for such diseases as cancer, diabetes, tuberculosis, and venereal disease, and maternal and baby health. New Deal artists of the Federal Art project designed the posters to deliver these messages.

New Deal funds dispersed from the Public Works Administration and the Works Progress Administration paid for new hospitals and additions to existing ones, new District Health Centers, dental health clinics, child health stations, many of the 250 dispensaries treating minor issues, as well as public health research, and the services of numerous health professionals. The Health Centers — eight were built by 1937 — provided better access to preventive care, and were attuned to the specific needs of their communities. In New York, the clinics were sometimes built in conjunction with public housing projects, either as separate buildings or located within the project itself. They were badly needed. For many New Yorkers, unemployment had translated into malnutrition, poor health, and rising levels of infant mortality. The clinics provided free health and dental care from the prenatal period and infant years to old age, and led immunization campaigns. Doctors and nurses worked in the clinics and made visits to homes and schools. Housekeepers were sent to help families where parents were ill. For many city residents, it was their first experience of regular health care. Services and activities promoting healthy living were offered through classes and reinforced by poster campaigns.

Williamsburg-Greenpoint Health Center

Williamsburg-Greenpoint Health Center (aka Williamsburg Child Health Clinic), 1937, one of eight financed by the Public Works Administration, across the street from the Williamsburg Houses (1936-38), also built with PWA funding and designated a New York City Landmark in 2003. Photos by Deborah Gardner and Aaron Fineman.

The Williamsburg Health Center was dedicated on July 27, 1938, with Mayor LaGuardia in attendance. The Center was designed by the firm of Henry C. Pelton who had died on August 28, 1935. Pelton had designed a number of hospitals, apartment houses, private homes, and several major churches in New York, including the magnificent Riverside Church in Morningside Heights, funded by John D. Rockefeller Jr. But as the Depression reduced the employment opportunities for major projects, his firm took on smaller, less costly projects like renovations for existing commercial and residential buildings.  It was probably at this time that his firm applied to build the health center; many other high profile architects in the city also sought commissions for federally-funded projects during the 1930s. Pelton’s experience designing hospital buildings made him a suitable candidate for the health center. Like the other clinics, the exterior is plain, a sparten Art Deco, but most unusual are the low relief plaques surrounding the entrance, celebrating the achievements of medical researchers and public health leaders. Among those honored on the plaques were Edward Jenner (small pox vaccination), Robert Koch (tuberculosis), Paul Ehrlich (syphilis), and Louis Pasteur (pasteurization).  There is even one woman, Florence Nightingale (nursing), which is also distinctive as women were not generally included in the medical murals of the era unless they were depicted as nurses. With these sculptures, Pelton must have been inspired by the carvings that graced the Riverside Church in emulation of medieval practice.

Child awaiting measles vaccination, 1941. Photo by Arthur Rothstein, Library of Congress, courtesy of Brodie Hefner.

Assorted health posters designed by Federal Art Project artists, Library of Congress WPA Poster Collection.

This huge investment in health services led to a decline in infant mortality, maternal deaths, and serious diseases like pneumonia, and even brought down the levels of suicide — with the new psychiatric services — that had increased during the early years of the Depression. It made health care available to more New Yorkers so although New York’s population increased from 6.9 million in 1930 to 7.4 million in 1940, general mortality rates declined as well as deaths from tuberculosis. Mayor LaGuardia supported all the new health initiatives, lobbied indefatigably for federal funding, and showed up for dedications of new infant health stations and child health clinics. These provided health and education programs, and were, like the new city hospitals, all built with federal funds which had increased the municipal health construction budget by 50 per cent.

The federal government also invested large sums to build new hospitals around the country and expanded its investment in research at state health departments and at the National Institute of Health, and also the created the National Cancer Institute in 1937.  In 1940, at the dedication of new buildings at the NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland, President Roosevelt said “We cannot be a strong nation unless we are a healthy nation.” Carrying that theme forward, the President included a health clause in his “Second Bill of Rights” enunciated as part of his annual State of the Union address to Congress in January 1944: “The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health.”

Medicine And Art: Initial Mural Projects

The bridge between these New Deal health initiatives and art evolved when Eleanor Roosevelt and others approached President Roosevelt to recommend expanding New Deal employment programs to include artists. The Federal Art Project was created in 1935 and mural painting became one its divisions. In New York, historians estimate from 200 to 250 murals were commissioned for public buildings, including 18 hospitals; and each commission might have several panels or encompass the walls of an entire hospital ward. The hospital murals were deemed both educational and therapeutic and many doctors supported the program because they thought it benefitted their patients by creating environments that were pleasant, soothing, and even inspirational.  The happiness that the nursery rhyme and circus themes brought to pediatric patients were especially valued for their contribution to the children’s recovery. Murals depicted the history of medicine, reminding visitors and patients of the benefits of modern medical practice and hospital services. Everyday life — work, recreation, community — was another popular topic.  Stylistically, realism ruled and there were very few abstract or surreal murals. Artists in the Poster Division of the FAP designed posters that were distributed by the thousands to alert people to medical services.

William C. Palmer

William C. Palmer (1906–1987). Function of a Hospital (1933-34), and Development of Medicine, aka Foibles of Medicine (1936–1937). Public lobby areas. Originally at Queens General Hospital, now NYC Health + Hospitals/ Elmhurst, Queens.

Born in Iowa, Palmer came to New York City to study at the Art Students League where he learned mural drawing in classes with Kenneth Hayes Miller and Thomas Benton. He furthered his mural design education in France where he acquired the fresco technique. Like many artists, his career foundered with the Depression but was restarted when the mural he designed in 1933 “Function of a Hospital” under the TERA (Temporary Emergency Relief Administration) was accepted for support under the PWAP (Public Works of Art Project) and space provided in the elevator lobby of the new Queens County General Hospital building in Jamaica. Palmer was paid $24.00 a week for his work in 1934. In 1936–37 he painted a second mural at the hospital, “The Development of Medicine,” under the aegis of the WPA Federal Art Project (FAP). When New York Times art columnist Edwin Alden Jewett saw the panels exhibited he wrote on May 9, 1937, “They strike me as being murals of genuine distinction, among the very best that have been produced since the WPA came into existence.” Life Magazine also featured these murals in the fall of 1937 with a photograph of people waiting in line for registration (admission) to the hospital and with a man in a white jacket (a doctor) pointing at a panel and explaining the topic. One history of the FAP murals notes that “these murals were actually used in the instruction of both nurses and interns.” It was clearly Palmer’s goal to encourage people to come to hospitals for model medical care to avoid more serious illness, and to understand the historical progression from antiquity to the present modern treatments and practices.

The themes for medical murals in New York City hospitals generally fell into two categories: educational/historical or therapeutic. Therapeutic covered a wide range of styles and content for adults but also included the nursery rhymes, children’s book characters, and circus topics for pediatric wards. The artists often did extensive research for their topics and consulted with medical professionals.  The Medical Superintendent at Queens General Hospital, Dr. Marcus Kogel, who was an admirer of Palmer’s murals, wrote in 1940: “Anything that will take the minds of the patients off their sickness is an aid to health. Pictures and murals that contribute to pleasant surroundings have this effect. In psychiatric wards, form and color as found in paintings have a definite place in the treatment of mental cases.”  Dr. Kogel was so enthusiastic about the value of murals that he approved another for the pediatric ward painted by African-American artist Georgette Seabrooke (1916–2011) which unfortunately does not survive. She is better known for her mural at Harlem Hospital) which has been restored and is on display.

During the next few years, Palmer won several coveted commissions from the Department of the Treasury’s Fine Arts Section to paint post office murals in Arlington, MA (1938), in Monticello, IA (1940), and at the Washington DC Post Office (1937) featuring mail coaches and covered wagons attacked by bandits, scenes which Esquire Magazine deemed “authentic Americana.”  He taught at the Art Students League, was active with the National Society of Mural Painters, and became Supervisor of Mural Projects in New York City for the WPA. He later described how the FAP Mural Section worked and its profound influence on artists’ careers — as well as his own career — and Americans’ appreciation of art:

There was a very large mural studio on one of the piers of the Hudson River where a great many projects were being painted. I was responsible to see that the jobs were completed, that the works were submitted to the Municipal Art Commission for approval. I was the liaison in contact with all of the various patrons, such as principals of schools and superintendents of hospitals, to see that the work was installed properly and that the jobs were completed satisfactorily. At the moment, I cannot recall how many hundreds were involved in this project, which was on a very large scale… Arshile Gorky…Edward Laning…Anton Refregier…Philip Guston…Ilya Bolotowsky…and many others…. we will all admit that it was the one thing which gave us the opportunity to continue with our own work and our own development, and it seems to me that this great project was the reason that today we have such a feeling for the need of art and why there is so much interest in the arts. I certainly feel that it was because of the Project’s work in education and exhibitions that I came to Utica, NY [in 1941] with this background, and the philosophy of the need of art in the community formed the basis upon which I organized and founded the School of Art at the [Munson-Williams-Proctor] Institute.

Palmer also taught at Hamilton College for several years while setting up the new art school where he remained director until his retirement in 1971. After his death in 1987, his papers and artistic materials were donated to Hamilton.     

Credits: Photographs of the Palmer murals by Nicholas Knight courtesy of NYC Health + Hospitals; photos of Palmer portrait and painting with his assistants, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; doctor looking at murals, Life Magazine, October 11, 1937, pp. 40-42; quote, William C. Palmer Oral History Interview, 1965, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. photo of Queens General Hospital, NYC Municipal Archives.

Function Of A Hospital

William Palmer, Artist, One Mural Panel at Queens General Hospital, 1933-1934. Now at NYC Health + Hospitals/Elmhurst, Queens. Oil on canvas mounted on Masonite. 19 feet. Photograph by Nicholas Knight.

Development Of Medicine

William Palmer, Artist, Eight Section Mural, Queens General Hospital, 1936–1937. Originally Queens General Hospital, now at NYC Health + Hospitals/Elmhurst, Queens. Photograph by Nicholas Knight. Panel caption by the artist.

Panel 1: Foibles of Medicine (aka Foibles of Uncontrolled Medicine)
The Middle Ages.

Panel 2: Greek Medicine
Scene 1 Hippocrates (460–370 BC), father of Modern Medicine.
Scene 2 Destruction of Greco-Roman Culture

Panel 3
Scene 1 Paracelsus (1493–1541), pioneer of toxicology.
Scene 2 Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564), pioneer of scientific anatomy.
Scene 3 Ambroise Paré (1510–1590), pioneer of modern surgery.

Panel 4
Antony von Leeuwenhoek (1632– 1723), microscopist and pioneer of microbiology. 

Panel 5
Charles Thomas Jackson (1805–1880) and William T. G. Morton (1819–1868), pioneers of surgical anesthesia.

Panel 6
Scene 1 Edward Jenner (1749–1823), pioneer of vaccination and immunology.
Scene 2 Joseph Lister (1827–1912), pioneer of antiseptic surgery.
Scene 3 Robert Koch (1843–1910), pioneer of modern bacteriology.

Panel 7
Scene 1 Wilhelm Konrad Roentgen (1845–1923), discoverer of X-rays.
Scene 2 Louis Pasteur (1822–1895), pioneer of medical microbiology, made breakthroughs in understanding causes and prevention of diseases.

Panel 8: Preventative Medicine (alternate title: Controlled Medicine)

Dr. Kogel, Medical Superintendent at Queens General, wrote a lengthy appreciation of this mural, “Medicine Through the Ages,” published in a medical magazine:

Mr. Palmer has taken us a long way—from myth through the classical ages of the healing art, the ages of darkness, the Renaissance—to the threshold of the golden age in medicine. In the last mural, we see the triumph of rational medicine over faith—the victory of science over superstition. We find here the application of the principles laid down by the great masters whose lives have just been reviewed. We see the demonstration of asepsis—anesthesia—prophylaxis— diagnosis. “Preventative Medicine” is the title Mr. Palmer has given to this last panel. It not only shows the modern period but also the future—for preventative medicine is the practice of tomorrow.

Queens General Hospital

Queens General Hospital, now NYC Health + Hospitals/Elmhurst, Queens. Photo of hospital, Municipal Archives, City of New York.

The city bought 22 acres of land in central Queens in 1903 and a decade later built the Queensboro Hospital for Communicable Diseases. It opened in 1916 and another building was added in 1923, and then a morgue. As the population of Queens grew rapidly, increasing from 469.000 in 1920 to almost a million by 1928, Queens Doctors felt it was urgent to ask the city to build a free public general hospital as the borough lacked one. The city financed a new nine-story Art Deco style building which was completed in 1932 but was unable to open: the city had no money to purchase equipment and furniture as municipal revenues plummeted with the Depression. It was not until 1934, when New York was awarded its first Public Works Administration grant, that the hospital could be properly outfitted; Works Progress Administration funds were used for the grounds and surrounding road improvements.  Queens General Hospital finally opened in the fall of 1935. It had the most modern treatment options, including specialized X-ray equipment, an iron lung to treat polio patients, and a facility to use radium to treat cancer patients. There were 582 beds in 18 wards but in less than a year it was overcrowded like many other municipal hospitals.  Poverty drove poor nutrition and frail bodies were more susceptible to disease. People skipped medical care because they couldn’t afford it until they became very ill and were forced to seek hospital care at the city’s free public hospitals. In 1941, a hospital for tuberculosis patients was added to the site, and its construction was funded by the WPA.

Credit: Photo of Queens General Hospital, Municipal Archives, City of New York.

Vincent Aderente
Murals Preceding The New Deal

Vincent Aderente (1880–1941), Artist, Enlightenment. 1932. Kings County Hospital. Now NYC Health + Hospitals/Kings County, Brooklyn. Photograph by Nicholas Knight.

Before most of the New Deal hospital murals focused on history and contemporary scenes (“the American scene” or realism), there were a few murals in city hospitals in the allegorical style that had been popular in public buildings from the beginnings of the Republic. The figures in this mural, located in the hospital’s rotunda, are Science, Knowledge, Truth, and Medicine.

Born in Naples, Italy, Aderente came to New York as a child and later studied at the Art Students League, the National Academy of Design, and in Paris. He worked for 30 years with Edwin H. Blashfield, one of the most popular and talented muralists in pre-New Deal America. Aderente painted an estimated 200 murals and those in the 1930s and 1940s depicted historical events. In New York City, his murals at the Flushing Post Office wrapped around the main lobby featuring the history of a dozen Queens communities; this project was probably funded by the Public Works of Art project given the dates (1933–34). At the Queens County Supreme Court House, he painted two massive murals on either side of a grand staircase, “Mosaic Law” and “Constitutional Law.” He also received commissions from commercial clients like the Lincoln Savings Bank in Brooklyn, where he painted scenes from Lincoln’s life.

New Deal Art: The Federal Art Project

The Federal Art Project

To conserve the talents and skills of artists who, through no fault of their own, found themselves on the relief rolls and without means to continue their work, to encourage young artists of definite ability, to integrate the fine with the practical arts and, more especially, the arts in general with the daily life of the community — these, in brief, are the primary objectives of the WPA federal Art Project.

The chief concern of the Federal Art Project has been to give employment to needy artists, but it has been able also to create works of art for the public which have a definite social value to the community.

In New York City, the Project’s creative divisions produce murals and photo-murals, easel paintings, sculpture, graphic prints, stained glass and photographs for tax-supported public buildings. Libraries, schools, armories, hospitals, municipal and state institutions, courthouses, prisons and other public buildings throughout New York have been recipients of these RFA Federal Art Project works.

Allocations are made on the basis of an indefinite loan, for which the recipient reimburses the Project for other than labor costs.

The divisions of the WPA Federal Art Project serving the Project itself or the public directly are art teaching, the Index of American Design, photography, exhibitions, posters, visual education, scenic designing, Four Arts Design Unit and the Restoration, Installation and Technical Service division.

The WPA Federal Art Project, providing employment and some measure of economic security to needy artists in all parts of the country, has been as well an instrument for their aesthetic rehabilitation. Skills have been conserved, new talents have been discovered and given the opportunity to develop, while an art tradition has been salvaged from the past for the future.

The restrictions which made art the special possession of the few, whose patronage fostered it as a luxury enjoyment, have been broken down and removed. The public has learned to accept the artist as a useful, producing member of the social family.

(The WPA Federal Art Project: A Summary of Activities and Accomplishments, 1939)

How The WPA Federal Art Project Came To Be

Assistance for unemployed artists started in New York City with a small, privately funded effort to provide stipends to artists. Then New York State Governor Franklin Roosevelt created the Temporary Emergency Relief Administration (TERA) in October 1931, with an appropriation of $20 million for emergency relief of the unemployed which provided some funds in 1932 under the aegis of the College Art Association for hiring mural artists. It would serve as a prototype for federal legislation once FDR became president in 1933. TERA was led by Harry Hopkins who went to Washington with FDR and ended up overseeing the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), the Civil Works Administration (CWA), and the Works Progress Administration (WPA). He was one of FDR’s closest advisors and was famously known for reminding the President, while he was considering the request to provide funds for the arts, that “even artists have to eat.”

The federal arts funding efforts were launched by George Biddle, a banker turned artist — a classmate of Roosevelt at Groton, their prep school, and at Harvard — who wrote to the president on May 9, 1933. He asked him to think about a program similar to that in Mexico where the government paid artists to paint murals on government buildings and suggesting something similar for the United States.: “[Artists] would be contributing to and expressing in living monuments the social ideals you are struggling to achieve. And I am convinced that our mural art, with little impetus, can soon result, for the first time in our history, in a vital national expression.” FDR arranged to have him talk to Treasury officials. A second letter, which Biddle circulated to Eleanor Roosevelt and others in June, 1933, led to more meetings with government officials and people from arts institutions. Eleanor Roosevelt attended one of the meetings with Edward Bruce of the Treasury Department and reminisced about it in 1938:

Many of us recalled the meeting four years ago which Mr. Edward Bruce held in his house to consider the plight of the artists and what the government could do, not only to encourage art, but to improve the quality of decoration in public buildings. Mr. Frederic A. Delano presided at this first meeting and the enthusiasm of the group which Mr. Bruce gathered around him has, with the help of Secretary and Mrs. Morgenthau, carried this project to heights of undreamed success. Many a little village and town can boast of murals in its post office done by some really good artist. In the future, perhaps, people will point to this period and say: ‘That was when the government first began to realize that art was a responsibility of the people as a whole.’

With her support, these efforts led to the first major federal program, the Public Works of Art Program (PWAP) under the aegis of the Treasury Department with funding from the Civil Works Administration — “the first national art relief program” – which lasted from late December 1933 to June 1934, and paid for art in non-federal buildings. Bruce, who became head of the PWAP, later told Eleanor that he would “always think of you as the patron saint of our art movement. It was you who graced the first step that was taken to start the movement for the artist, and since that time I am happy to tell you how splendidly it has resulted.”  Following the PWAP was the Treasury Section on Painting and Sculpture (later known as the Section of Fine Arts) which from 1935 to 1943 commissioned hundreds of murals and other art for federal buildings, mostly post offices and court houses; a smaller program was the Treasury Relief Act (1935–1939).

The largest federal art program was the Federal Art Project (FAP) created in 1935 as a part of Federal Project No.1, under the umbrella of the Works Project Administration. Project No. 1 provided funding for the Federal Art Project, the Federal Theater Project, the Federal Music Project, the Federal Writers Project, and the Index of American Design. Launched in November 1935, the Federal Art Project would eventually employ over 10,000 artists and produce in eight years some 200,000 artworks including several thousand murals. The Federal Art Project began with Holger Cahill as National Director and Audrey McMahon as New York Regional Director and Assistant to the National Director.

Founders Of The Federal Art Project

President Franklin D. Roosevelt
Source: Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (Digital File Number: cph 3c17121).

Eleanor Roosevelt And Colleagues, detail from a mural painted by Lucien Labaudt (1880–1943) in 1934, a section in one of two 6’ x 32’ panels, in Coit Tower, San Francisco, which were funded by the Public Works of Art Project and employed 25 artists. The section of “Powell Street” is based on a photograph of Edward Bruce, Eleanor Roosevelt, Forbes Watson and Chip Roberts, looking at a map of PWAP districts around the country. In the photo, from left, Edward Bruce, director of the Section of Fine Arts, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, Assistant. Secretary of the Treasury Lawrence “Chip” Robert, Jr., and Public Works of Art Project director Forbes Watson discussing plans for arts projects, 1934. Harris & Ewing Collection, Library of Congress. Photo of mural by Gray Brechi.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt And
The Role Of Art In American Life

Dedicating the new National Gallery of Art on March 17, 1941

There was a time when the people of this country would not have thought that the inheritance of art belonged to them or that they had responsibilities to guard it. A few generations ago, the people of this country were often taught by their writers and by their critics and by their teachers to believe that art was something foreign to America and to themselves — something imported from another continent, something from an age which was not theirs — something they had no part in, save to go to see it in some guarded room on holidays or Sundays.

But recently, within the last few years — yes, in our lifetime — they have discovered that they have a part. They have seen in their own towns, in their own villages, in schoolhouses, in post offices, in the back rooms of shops and stores, pictures painted by their sons, their neighbors — people they have known and lived beside and talked to. They have seen, across these last few years, rooms full of painting and sculpture by Americans, walls covered with painting by Americans — some of it good, some of it not so good, but all of it native, human, eager, and alive — all of it painted by their own kind in their own country, and painted about things that they know and look at often and have touched and loved.

The people of this country know now, whatever they were taught or thought they knew before, that art is not something just to be owned but something to be made; that it is the act of making and not the act of owning that is art. And knowing this they know also that art is not a treasure in the past or an importation from another land, but part of the present life of all the living and creating peoples – all who make and build; and, most of all, the young and vigorous peoples who have made and built our present wide country.

It is for this reason that the people of America accept the inheritance of these ancient arts. Whatever these paintings may have been to men who looked at them generations back – today they are not only works of art. Today they are the symbols of the human spirit, symbols of the world the freedom of the human spirit has made — and, incidentally, a world against which armies now are raised and countries overrun and men imprisoned and their work destroyed.

* * *

To accept this work today is to assert the purpose of the people of America that the freedom of the human spirit and human mind—which has produced the world’s great art and all its science shall not be utterly destroyed.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, Address at the Dedication of the National Gallery of Art. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project

Eleanor Roosevelt And The Arts 

First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt had drawn on her own love of art to support the creation of the federal programs — the Public Works of Art Program and the Federal Art Project — to employ artists. She enjoyed going to art exhibits in galleries and museums and during her travels around the country, she frequently visited public art projects or exhibitions featuring FAP projects. In 1934 she spoke in Washington DC at the convention of the American Federation of Arts on the topic “The New Governmental Interest in the Arts.”  In this talk she set out themes that would appear again and again in her writing during the following years:

I think that we, all of us, now are conscious of the fact that appreciation of beauty is something that is of vital importance to us…. We are now developing an interest and an ability to really say when we like a thing — which is a great encouragement to those of us who think that we want to develop in a democracy a real feeling that each individual can have a love for art, and appreciate that which appeals to him as an individual…. I have been interested in seeing the Government begin to take the attitude that they had a responsivity towards art, and towards artists

It was fitting that Mrs. Roosevelt addressed the AFA for that year it launched a national radio program on “Art in America 1600-1865” evidently believing there was a broad audience for learning about the arts.

Almost as soon as she started publishing her newspaper column My Day in 1936, she began reporting on American art. She wrote about her visits to Federal Art Centers, the Federal Art Gallery in New York, and other art galleries in the city. When she traveled she visited many WPA projects and saw their mural art. As she wrote about them, she described them in detail but then reflected on their larger meaning, a juxtaposition that was common to her writing on many topics. She reported on murals-in-progress in several Washington buildings in December 1936 and wrote:

It is rather thrilling to feel that the government for the first time in its history is actually giving consideration to things which will make living richer for all of us…. Perhaps the day will come when artists as a whole whether they are painters, sculptors, musicians, actors, or singers may look not for appreciation and assistance from individual patrons or foundations which some rich and cultured individual has established, but may actually feel that the government which is really the people as a whole is the place to turn for assistance and understanding.

After a visit to FAP projects in Phoenix AZ in 1938, she concluded, “It gives one a sense of satisfaction to realize that, in spite of the fact that the depression forced upon us the necessity of giving people work through WPA, we have managed to make the work so useful that much of it will be enjoyed long after the depression is forgotten.”

She promoted National Art Week. Many FAP artists showed their non-project art work in galleries for sale. Local committees advertised the exhibits and “They have been able to stress the need of the artist to sell his wares, which is, after all, something every citizen must recognize. If artists are to contribute to the pleasure of our daily lives, they must also make a living.”

When Congress wanted to make serious cuts in WPA funding and programs in 1939, she addressed the pain it would bring to individuals. As a result of the ensuing budget cuts, pink slips would be given out to FAP artists: “But when it comes down to human beings, then it is different and I wonder if we don’t have to solve these problems from the standpoint of human beings or else acknowledge that we are beaten and that something is wrong with both our government and our economic setup.”

Of course she accompanied the President to the opening of the National Gallery of Art on March 18, 1941; the building a gift of Andrew Mellon and the art contributed by the equally wealthy Samuel H. Kress. Although not a WPA project, it was an opportunity for her to express her thoughts on the relationship between democracy and art, against the background of world at war, a calamity the United States would be joining months later:

I think it is good for us all to realize at this time that art and beauty are necessary for the preservation of the finest things in life. Education comes to all of us through contact with things of beauty, wherever they might be. As we develop appreciation and understanding of new forms of beauty, we become rounded and educated human beings. These things are being suppressed in other countries today. In every democracy, we must insist on the development of every avenue for increasing the enjoyment of beauty.

Federal Art Project: The Mural Division

Among the WPA Federal Art Project’s creative divisions, work in mural painting has been of paramount importance, both in discovering new talent and in offering artists a medium of expression which had previously been denied all but recognized painters. (The WPA Federal Art Project: A Summary of Activities and Accomplishments, 1939)

New York was the only Federal Art Project operating unit that had a special unit for murals.  Artists went to FAP headquarters at 110 King Street in the West Village to get assignments, and some did their painting at another building on the West Side of Manhattan that had space for large canvas panels.

Before the New Deal, there was mural painting in New York in private residences as well publically-accessible buildings like hotels, courts, restaurants, office buildings, and theaters. But renewed interest came in the late 1920s and early 1930s with high profile commissions at the new Rockefeller Center — for the Radio City Music Hall and the RCA Building — and also at the New School for Social Research. American artists admired, and were influenced by, the technique and socially-conscious subject matter of the Mexican muralists — especially Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros. A number of the Federal Art Project artists worked with Rivera in Mexico and New York, and others had attended an experimental workshop that Siqueiros ran at 5 West 14^th Street in 1936. Using centuries-old methods and experimenting with new ones, New Deal artists revitalized and democratized the craft of mural painting. As New York Times art critic Anita Brenner wrote in 1938, “Space, precision, concreteness, homeliness, humor and imaginative techniques – these are the character germ of the new American mural art.

During the New Deal there were two major mural programs. The Federal Art Project had a Murals Division. To qualify for its work assignments, artists had to pass a means test showing little or no income. They were paid a salary of about $23 to $28 a week ($506-$617 in 2023), with supervisors paid more, and assigned to projects. The U.S. Treasury Department administered its Section of Fine Arts to commission murals and sculptures for post offices and new federal buildings around the country. In contrast to the FAP, Treasury artists obtained assignments through competitions and better known artists were even offered assignments directly. They were paid a lump sum for their work out of which they purchased materials and paid for assistants as well as their own labor. The most famous Section projects were the hundreds of post office murals around the country.

The art critics of the New York Times wrote frequently about the revival of mural painting in New York and elsewhere under the aegis of the Federal Art Project. Edward Alden Jewell termed it “an undertaking so vast and complex . . . the American mural is finding its way, becoming conscious of its own innate power, gaining momentum.” He also admired the FAP leadership of Mrs. Audrey McMahon, “guiding encouraging educating — the creative drive of an organization intelligently directed, alert, responsive to new currents, realistic in its acknowledgement of problems that must be faced in a changed and ever-changing social order.” The Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art all featured murals (preparatory sketches, paintings of sections) in exhibitions, as did commercial art galleries and the Federal Art Gallery in New York. The Museum of Modern Art commissioned Jose Clemente Orozco to paint a mural on site and arranged for visitors to observe him at work.

Artists used several techniques for murals.  Fresco is the term used for painting on plaster. With dry, or fresco secco, the paint is applied to a dry plaster wall that has been specially treated. With wet or buon fresco (true fresco), a thin layer of plaster is applied to the wall and the artist paints directly on that so the color binds with the plaster and the image becomes part of the wall. The image must be completed before the plaster dries so an artist could spend hours on a scaffold completing a section that had been prepared with a thin layer of wet plaster. Most of the New York hospital murals were painted on canvas which was then affixed to a frame or directly to the wall. The artist prepared small sized sketches, enlarged them to outlines of actual size on the walls (known as cartoons), and then painted.

The murals reached huge sizes and even for medium size works the artists had aspiring assistants. At one New York high school there were two mural panels, each 65 feet long by 17 feet high, totaling 2,000 square feet of imagery. At the Marine Air Terminal (once called the Sea Plane Terminal) at La Guardia Airport, the 12-foot high mural encircles the room above the heads of passengers and visitors for 235 feet. Abram Champanier’s murals at Gouverneur Hospital covered all four walls of the large pediatric ward. At Harlem Hospital Georgette Seabrooke’s mural was 19 feet long, and those of Vertis Hayes filled two corridor walls.

Most murals were in a realistic or naturalistic style which was promoted generally among all the divisions of the FAP. However, there were some murals that were completely abstract in linear or biomorphic design, others with allegorical or symbolic figures, and some hybrids. “The American Scene” was the theme encouraged by the FAP and that resulted in historical narratives or specific historical incidents as portrayed in the murals by Charles Davis and Axel Horn at the Seaview Farm Colony.  By June 1940, 160 projects had been completed or were underway in New York, and there were almost that number of additional requests for murals as the Times reported, “Instead of having to fight for walls upon which artists might be put to work, the WPA Art Project now has more orders than it can seem to catch up with.”

Federal Art Project murals were painted everywhere in New York City: at airports, courthouses, prisons, post offices, libraries, borough halls, public housing, in parks and zoos, museums, and at many, many elementary and high schools in all the boroughs, and at the library on the new campus of Brooklyn College. They were painted at Ellis Island, the U.S. Customs House, the WNYC Studios (the city’s radio station), and at the 1939 World’s Fair. Almost all the public hospitals in New York had mural projects.

A mural project started when the head of the FAP murals division in New York — William Palmer held this position after he completed his murals at Queens General Hospital — looked at possible sites and spoke with the head of an institution such as school principal, or the director of a hospital. If that person was interested, the FAP supervisor chose an artist who visited the site to look at the possible location within the building and to speak with the administrator. The artist developed a theme, drafted preliminary drawings, and prepared a statement about the topic. These were submitted to the Municipal Art Commission with a form signed by the head of the institution. The Commission (now known as the Public Design Commission) had jurisdiction to review all proposals to build or alter public artworks and monuments as well as all public buildings and open space. The Commission reviewed mural proposals by looking at sketches, a full-size sample, blueprints, possibly a model, and information about size and medium. A committee of three commissioners, usually headed by painter Ernest Peixotto, could give preliminary approval to the artist to proceed, or suggest changes which had to be re-submitted, or could disapprove of the proposal. In most cases, mural sketches and proposals were approved without much discussion, or accepted after revisions were made. If the Commission approved, the artist set to work, usually with one or more assistants paid by the FAP.  Once the mural was complete, the artist again prepared an application to the Commission, submitting additional drawings, and it was photographed.  If both the head of the institution and the Commission found it satisfactory, Final Approval was given.  Of this arduous process, artist Edward Laning recalled, “I had to submit sketches to the Commissioner of Immigration at Ellis Island and to the Board of Directors at the New York Public Library. A mural painter has to expect that. You can’t hope to walk into a public building and express yourself on the walls in any damn way you please. It has to be to some extent a public matter.”

Occasionally controversy arose like that surrounding the well-publicized Harlem Hospital murals. In that instance the disapproval by the director of the hospital and the city’s Commissioner of Health were overcome and the murals proceeded.  In some situations, such as the murals proposed by artist Ben Shahn for the new Rikers Island Penitentiary, they were not approved by the warden of the jail and were never painted. Like other mural artists, Shahn had done his research. He had visited and studied other prisons as background for his work.  His subject matter for Rikers included a history of punishment.  Everyone weighed in, pro and con, from the head of Rikers to prisoners interviewed by the newspapers to art critics and finally one of the Art Commissioners, Jonas Lie, who said they should be whitewashed.  Suffice to say, Shahn’s murals did not move forward and different artists were hired for the project. Shahn painted a mural with his wife Bernarda, at the Bronx General Post Office (Grand Concourse and 149^th Street) which survived and is now landmarked. Its final approval was actually held up for several months because objection was raised to a Walt Whitman quote that Shahn had included and was misconstrued as being anti-religious.

Credit: Edward Laning quote, Artists at Work: A Film on the New Deal Arts Projects, Mary Lance, Producer and Director, New Deal Films, 1981.

Mural Techniques — Marion Greenwood

Marion Greenwood (1909–1970) preparing a full size outline (cartoon) of her mural and painting one of the three sections of “Blueprint for Living” at the Red Hook Houses Recreation Center (community building), 1940. Trained in fresco technique in Mexico, where she had worked with Diego Rivera and other muralists, Greenwood completed her own large mural, “The Industrialization of the Countryside” there. Shortly after her return to the U.S. in 1936, she received the Red Hook commission from the Federal Art Project. She described the usual process: “I had to do small color scale cartoons, then the large drawing and full scale and then finally the actual walls.” She also experienced the pressures that FAP mural artists felt at the time: “I had to change it and change it according to all the bureaucrats looking at it.” Many artists, including those at Harlem Hospital, had to negotiate the unusual circumstances of public patronage and scrutiny in a field where the artist was used to relative freedom to interpret their subject matter. The mural was dedicated on November 27, 1940 with Mary Simkhovitch, the head of the New York City Housing Authority, in attendance. Greenwood remembered Eleanor Roosevelt as “very kind and always aware of the struggle of the artist and always trying to help out with anything progressive.” Greenwood, who was among the most talented mural artists of her generation, male or female, also painted FAP murals at a New Jersey housing project, the University of Tennessee and Syracuse University, and won a commission from the Treasury Section of Fine Arts to paint a mural at Tennessee post office.  She taught fresco at Columbia University and during World War II served stateside in the US Army Program. After the war she traveled to China and Europe, and continued her career painting, exploring a variety of media, and exhibiting. Her murals at Red Hook Houses have disappeared.

Marion Greenwood Oral History Interview, 1964, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Federal Art Project: Posters

The work of the poster division, in the main, consists of announcing, illustrating, and advertising the many enterprises of WPA Federal Projects and of state, municipal and federal departments and agencies. Attesting to its social value and public influence, the poster division has waged an unrelenting pictorial war on disease, crime, noise and vandalism. (The WPA Federal Art Project: A Summary of Activities and Accomplishments, 1939)

The Federal Art Project’s poster division originated in a 1934 New York City initiative to employ artists. In 1935 it became part of the FAP and posters were produced to publicize the activities of many New Deal programs in the city, including art, health and safety, education, entertainment and recreation, local and special events, as well as the services of all levels of the city, state, and national government. Artists drew from a range of styles, with strong graphics and dense colors for posters calling attention to disease prevention and treatment — for the city and state health departments — to the softer drawings and lighter color palette announcing art exhibitions at the FAP Art Gallery and art classes at the community art centers.  Posters were originally done by hand but when New York artists pioneered the silkscreen technique they could turn out hundreds of pieces a day. Poster workshops were set up in seventeen other states but New York was the most prolific, followed by Chicago. It is estimated that 35,000 designs in two million copies were made, yet only about 2,000 survive. After the United States entered World War II, poster activities were absorbed into the Graphics Section of the Office of War Information in the Defense Department to make posters and other graphics and design camouflage patterns.

Credit: From the Library of Congress Collection of WPA Posters.

Federal Art Project: Community Art Centers

The largest of these divisions, art teaching, is perhaps most far reaching in its immediate effectiveness. Its ever widening scope, making possible the development of a greater sensitiveness to art among the coming generation, encompasses young people all over the country who will form a genuine audience for American art in the future.

It is of paramount importance to the community that children shall have ample opportunity to indulge and express their creative fancies. Rather than attempting to make professional artists of the many thousands of young people who daily attend WPA Federal Project classes, art teachers are opening up an enchanting world, too long denied the underprivileged children of the country.

Guidance along new, unexplored paths is given to these 6- to 16-year-olds, who had been culturally, as well as economically, trapped by the circumstances of their lives. Classes in painting, sculpture, graphic art and craft work, originally planned for the children of the community who cannot afford private tuition, have had to be augmented by classes for adults in response to their requests.

New York’s Community Art Centers, established in Manhattan — Harlem and the Upper East Side — in Flushing, Queens, and Brooklyn, make it possible more closely to integrate and coordinate community needs with classes, exhibitions, lectures and other services offered by the centers.

The public which benefits directly from the art teaching division of the WPA Federal Art Project also is ultimately the recipient of the art works produced under WPA Federal Art Project supervision for tax-supported buildings. Gallery exhibitions offer taxpayers the best opportunity to see and discuss the results of the Federal art program.

(The WPA Federal Art Project: A Summary of Activities and Accomplishments, 1939)

The Federal Art Project paid instructors to teach art classes wherever an institution was willing to provide space; among the hosts were settlement houses, churches, YMCAs, and schools.  But the most ambitious FAP teaching program was funding Community Art Centers around the country. More than 100 were created in large cities and small towns in every state, including about a dozen in African-American communities. The FAP paid the salaries of the instructors and a director and the locale provided the space (or a building) and the art supplies, often with money raised by the local residents and businesses.

The most famous Centers were in New York and Chicago, building on previously existing art programs and able to draw on deep reserves of practicing artists to teach children, amateur adults, and those aspiring to professional status in the arts. They offered courses in painting, sculpture, printing, and many other subjects.

New York had four Community Art Centers: the Brooklyn Community Art Center, the Contemporary Art Center in Manhattan for serious art students, the Harlem Community Art Center, and the Queensboro [Queensborough] Community Art Center. All the African-American artists who painted hospital murals were involved with the Harlem Center as instructors or students or exhibitors at its exhibitions.

First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt attended the opening day ceremony on Dec 20, 1937 at the Harlem Center whose sponsoring committee was headed by union leader and civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph, and whose first director was the highly regarded sculptor Augusta Savage. Mrs. Roosevelt saw an exhibition of art by members of the Harlem Artists Guild and work by art students and deemed it “a splendid enterprise of great value in helping to develop Negro artists and significant Negro art.” She also described the Center’s activities in her newspaper column, My Day:

At twelve o’clock I visited the Harlem Community Art Center, at 290 Lenox Avenue, just below 125^th Street, and I was deeply interested in this WPA Art Project. They have a Teachers Institute where teachers from all over the five boroughs of the City of New York can come to improve their artistic education. Of course, this Center is for the use of school children and 400 of them are already registered. The Gallery will have exhibitions which will change once a month, and I think we have here a most interesting addition to the cultural life of Harlem and the City in general.

A few years later she attended the dedication ceremony for the South Side Community Art Center in Chicago and her remarks were broadcast nationwide on the radio on May 7, 1941. The Center had actually opened six months earlier and offered courses in painting, lithography, poster design, fashion illustration, interior decoration, silk screen, weaving, and hooked rug-making. By the time Mrs. Roosevelt arrived, a reported 13,500 people had attended classes, exhibitions, and events. The inter-racial teaching staff included Charles Davis who had painted murals at the Staten Island Farm Colony.

There were at least a dozen African-American Art Centers, in Jacksonville, Oklahoma City, Chicago, New York, Richmond and Lynchburg, VA, Cleveland, Atlanta, and Raleigh and Greensboro NC. In Memphis TN, where the Center was located at LeMoyne College, an African-American institution, Harlem Hospital muralist Vertis Hayes was hired in1938 to be its first director. Hayes viewed the Art Centers as key components to developing a connection between African-American artists and their communities. He noted that talented African Americans had to leave their communities behind to obtain good training:

To appreciate any art one must be aware of its development, approach, and philosophy. The latter problem is largely due to the lack of opportunity for visual participation for Negroes in many sections while many of these same communities have museums and galleries maintained and supported by tax-treated funds. [With the Community Art Centers] for the first time in history many more thousands are sharing in a broad cultural program that may eventually become more national in scope. And in which, in the final analysis, the cultural standard of this country as a nation will be determined.

Credits: Hayes quote, “The Negro Artist Today,” Art for the Millions, Francis V. O’Connor, ed. (New York Graphic Society, 1973).

Mrs. Roosevelt at dedication of the South Side Chicago Art Center, May 7, 1941. Collection National Archives and Record Center at FDR Library.

Federal Art Project:
The Federal Art Gallery

The New York City WPA Federal Art Project was the first to present, in its own gallery, public exhibitions of representative art works created under the Federal art program.

The initial show in the WPA Federal Art Gallery, then located at 7 East 38^th Street, opened in December 1935. It put on view color and black-and-white sketches for mural designs, cartoons, and detail panels of murals already allocated or yet to be allocated to the various eligible institutions in New York.

Since this first exhibition, 36 other shows have been presented. The first gallery to be opened in the heart of New York City’s shopping and manufacturing district, its exhibitions attracted an audience which hitherto had no opportunity to spend even a brief time in gallery visits.

In addition to those casual passersby who viewed exhibitions during their lunch hour, or, perhaps as an interlude during shopping, the gallery guest book also registered many from other localities in the United States.

The present [1939] gallery, at 225 West 57^th Street, provides a more spacious background for Project exhibitions in the very center of New York City’s art activity. (The WPA Federal Art Project: A Summary of Activities and Accomplishments, 1939)

What The Federal Art Project Meant To The Painters

The Federal Art Project made it possible for artists to be artists. In 1981, a group of mural painters and easel painters shared their thoughts. The easel painters had more freedom to choose their subject matter. The mural painters had to go through a sometimes arduous approval process for their designs and topics.  All quotes are drawn from: Artists at Work: A Film on the New Deal Art Projects, Mary Lance, Producer and Director, New Deal Films, 1981.

Paid To Be An Artist

Jacob Lawrence,

It was the very first time I was paid [as an artist]. So everything that’s happened to me is because of that period.

Joseph Delaney

In my youth I saw some very, very bad situations. Bread lines on the streets of New York. Poverty you can’t describe how awful it was. And it was a moving scene for any sensitive person who had a story to tell of their time. The WPA project made the artist independent creative people.

Edward Laning

We were getting paid what we most wanted to do and getting paid a living way to do it. It was a glorious time.

Lee Krasner

The WPA was a lifesaver so that I could continue to literally stay alive and paint.

Ilya Bolotowsky

We were very happy to have a chance to give all of our time to painting.  We were not bothered because of our styles and the results of course were quite fantastic.

In the middle of a depression, where it was very hard to survive economically, a great any artists had a chance to give all their time to create a painting.

Chaim Gross

Without the WPA I think many many great artists would have gotten lost.

Impact On The Artist

Edward Laning

The people learned all over the country what art was. People who had never seen a painting before in their lives.

Jacob Lawrence

In my own work I was doing things that I perceived around me. Walking the streets of Harlem, getting images for my paintings, going the Apollo Theatre. There you heard jokes, comments about the WPA. Then from the Apollo going to the studio. This is what motivated me. Seeing color, seeing the juxtaposition of light, of sound, of noise, of people and it was all sort of interrelated.

Prior to this time, we had two or three art centers in Harlem and these all came together and established this one center which we called the Harlem Art Center. I came in contact with people older than myself, with people who have me information and there was a vitality, there was an interest, there was an interest in social issues, all of this became part of what I’m doing now. It became a part of my thinking, a part of my philosophy. So I was taking this in without even realizing it.

I think the main thing was the passion that we had at that time. All the people in the arts. Dancers, actors, painters, musicians, there was a great passion, a great feeling about what we were doing. We fought over it, both in a symbolic way and a physical way. I saw people fighting, defending a point of view.

Chaim Gross

There was a lot of freedom in the WPA. I could choose my subject and they gave me time for working on it. If I needed another two weeks, another week, another 10 days, I could do it.

Harry Gottlieb

A whole new world was opened up to the artist. No longer was it an isolated individual but part of a whole. It was engaged for the first time on public art.

Here was a time when the artist could really work full time at his art.

James Brooks

It took all the strain off of us. It was a friendly family, a very pleasant atmosphere to work in. I got the feeling at the time that the artist would like to communicate with the public in much of a direct way than they had been. I think they were spurred by the Mexican muralists who had been decorating their buildings for a long while down there. Rivera, Orozco, Siqueiros, very beautiful very large things, because they wanted to speak directly to the public.

Alice Neel

There was a tendency for artists to live in an ivory tower. The value of the WPA was it took an artist out of their studio and they saw more of the reality. I had not done street scenes before but on the WPA I did any number of neighborhoods and street scenes where besides showing the street, and the neighborhood and everything else, I showed the condition of the people in it.

Charles Alston

One of the very important things of that period was that artists, for the first time, got some sense of an identity…. So younger artists had an opportunity to talk to the artists who were prominent. There was a democracy about the whole thing that was very rewarding, very beneficial. As I stated before, just going down to get your pay – which was a thing that didn’t have great dignity — you stood on a line and you waited your turn. Some of those days, by golly, in the wintertime were cold. You’d stand out in rain, or snow, or sleet, or cold. And you got to talking; you got to know people. As I say, I got to know [Arshile] Gorky. As you look back on it, these were valuable experiences.

Cutbacks

Joseph Delaney

You got a pink slip that meant that you were being fired and your services were being discontinued. And you want back on Home Relief and found that your condition was equally poor as the first time. You might get a job back. I was hired five different times on the project. And each time I got a pink slip.

Harry Gottlieb

The artists formed an artist union and became a local of the CIO union. For the first time in American history, artists belonged to a bonified union. All kinds of things were happening which kept the artists involved. They couldn’t help but meet on the picket line, or going to headquarters. The whole atmosphere was conducive to change, change in a social sense. The funding for WPA was extremely difficult and a big problem. And we had to continuously fight.

Joseph Solman

The artist’s union was really formed to make accessible jobs to all strata of artist and to incorporate the artist in work like teaching, mural painting, easel painting, printmaking and so forth. At one of our demonstrations, I believe late in ’37, to picket against layoffs of artists, which happened periodically, a few paddy wagons came along and jailed about 150, 200 of us. In the lineup, the first artist came up and gave his name as Jim Picasso. That was the clue for the rest of us to use Michelangelo, Vermeer, Rembrandt, and the rest of it without the policemen batting an eyelash. When my friend who was a big fan of James Joyce gave his name, the cop came over to him and whispered in his ear, “How come an Irishman like you got mixed up in this gang?”

Edward Laning

The difficulties the project had with Congress and the press were simply difficulties Franklin Roosevelt had had with the New Deal. The Republican papers were hostile. Republican Congressmen were hostile.

End Of The Federal Art Project, Fate Of The Art

In fulfilling a two-fold purpose, the WPA Federal Art Project has established a firm foundation for the future of art in this country while it has preserved for safe keeping, beyond the assault of time and disuse, our heritage from the past.

(The WPA Federal Art Project: A Summary of Activities and Accomplishments, 1939)

Unfortunately, this 1939 prophecy about the permanency of the art would not come true. The project funding was essentially ended in 1939, but the project limped along and was subsumed into the Office of War Information with the start of World War II. A number of the WPA artists then provided art for war-related publications for the government or private industry but the unit at OWI was phased out in 1943, so that is often considered the end of the FAP.

The fate of ‘leftover’ art was disheartening. Easel paintings and sculpture were the most vulnerable.  The paintings were sold as canvas. Chaim Gross recalled that “With the sculpture it was tragedy. They couldn’t sell the sculptures and they took the plaster sculptures, hundreds of them, by different sculptors, and just shredded them and threw them in the Long Island swamps.”

In recent years, there have been debates in California, Kentucky, and Mississippi about the subject matter of some New Deal murals, especially as to whether their content was disrespectful in the portrayal of African Americans and Native Americans or whether the artist was actually critical of the racism and discrimination displayed in the historic context.  Proposals to paint over or remove these murals have been vigorously debated. But even during the 1930s and 1940s newly painted murals were subject to censure or even destruction due to their subject matter or style. Perhaps the most famous case was the destruction of the privately commissioned Diego Rivera mural at Rockefeller Center in 1934 because he refused to remove an image of Lenin.  In New York a few Federal Art Project murals didn’t even survive the New Deal. At Floyd Bennett field, murals on the history of flight (1940) painted by August Henkel were removed and burned because the New York City WPA administrator Colonel Brehon Somervell believed there was a likeness of Stalin. Two, 900 sq. ft. murals at Brooklyn Borough Hall, depicting historic and modern Brooklyn, completed in 1938, were removed in 1946 and put into storage — with the permission of the Art Commission — because the Borough President didn’t like them. They disappeared over time.

In the years that followed, many FAP murals were permanently or temporarily lost. David Margolis’ Bellevue murals were hidden away by 1945 due to a renovation. Murals were painted over or damaged due to ignorance or politics. Ilya Bolotowsky’s and Albert Swinden’s murals at the Williamsburg Houses were painted over and those at the Hospital for Chronic Disease were also obscured.  Harlem Hospital murals deteriorated from neglect. Only a few artists lived long enough to see their murals recalled to life.

Contemporary politics also played a role. For example, a good number of the FAP artists were immigrants. Their families had generally arrived before the severe crackdown on immigration in 1925 and many became citizens. But anti-immigrant sentiment surfaced perennially during hard times and in 1937 the FAP was told it could no longer hire non-citizens. Only those non-citizen muralists who had already started their projects could finish.  Accusations that imagery was Communist or Socialist, no matter how far-fetched, could be fatal

James Brooks [1981]

The mural [at the Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia] was covered at the time of the Red Scare produced by the McCarthy hearings in Washington and there was a great hysteria throughout the country and although there may not be a direct connection to the painting over of the mural, it’s very likely that the mood of the country at that time was frightened into seeing things that didn’t exist such as hammers and sickles. … They also weren’t able to look at the W PA paintings very easily because they were done in times that were sympathetic to the Communists more so than it was at present. So in other words it paralyzed people’s ability to see. The mural luckily has been restored. It was hidden from about 1952 to 1980 and I was amazed by how well it turned out. 

William Palmer [1964]

It was stated in a recent book on the WPA — that the panel “Controlled Medicine” [at Queens General Hospital] was in effect a plea for and propaganda for socialized medicine. This statement is without any basis of fact, and the author never contacted me for my analysis panel. To put the record straight — the mural “Development of Medicine” was painted to show the ignorance, superstition and fear of “uncontrolled medicine” — the great historical contributions and discoveries which lead up to the scientific and enlightened medicine and hospital care of the 30s, as shown in Controlled Medicine. The theme of this panel shows the equipment, etc. used by the hospital in prevention of disease and the treatment of the patient. Socialized medicine was not in my vocabulary in 1936, and certainly in doing my research for the work it was never considered or mentioned by any hospital authority. The real purpose of the murals at Queens was to serve two main purposes – one, to give the waiting patients in the “in-coming and out-going patients rooms” something to look at and to inform them of the history and background of treatment — and two, Dr. Kogel, the Superintendent of Queens used the panels in this lectures to student nurses on the history of medicine.

Credits: Brooks, Artists at Work: A Film on the New Deal Art Projects, Mary Lance, Producer and Director, New Deal Films, 1981; Palmer, Oral History Interview, 1965, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Hospital Murals: Abstract Art

Albert Swinden

Albert Swinden (1901–1961). Abstraction. 1942. Day Room Mural, Hospital for Chronic Disease on Welfare Island (later known as Goldwater Hospital, Roosevelt Island). Now installed in the Bloomberg Building on the Cornell Tech Campus, Roosevelt Island. 303 sq. ft.  each. 7 feet tall.

Albert Swinden was born in England, moved as a child to Canada, and immigrated to the US in 1919. He began his art studies in Chicago and then continued in New York where he studied at the National Academy of Design and then for several years at the Art Students League. He became interested in abstract art and started meeting with other like-minded artists. In 1936 they founded the American Abstract Artists to exhibit together, experiment, and strengthen the acceptance of that mode of expression. That same year Swinden and three other artists, including Ilya Bolotowsky, were chosen by Burgoyne Diller, head of the Mural Division of the Federal Art Project and an abstract painter himself, to create murals for the new Williamsburg Housing Project in Brooklyn. As a group they were the first abstract murals in the country. Swinden’s was large, approximately 9’ x 14’ ft. Swinden described his art at that time: “We are moved not only by particular, or individual forms, but by the relationships between the particular forms and their significance as a unity.”

For his second FAP assignment, Swinden was one of six artists, including Bolotowsky again and Joseph Rugolo, selected to paint murals at the new Chronic Disease Hospital built with Works Progress Administration funds on Welfare Island [now known as Roosevelt Island].  The buildings were similar to the Williamsburg Houses, in that they were set at angles, low rise, and thus had access to the light and air and also views of the river that would be refreshing for patients. The Commissioner of the Department of Health introduced a research program at the hospital while it cared for the chronically ill and polio patients. The buildings had round day rooms where Swinden had the opportunity to paint his mural. By using abstract forms, Swinden hoped to create a mood of relaxation different from the reality of the everyday lives of patients and staff.

When the hospital, closed in 2013, was slated for demolition, a search found the Swinden and Rugolo murals, which had been painted over (the Bolotowsky was never ‘lost’ in the same way and had been conserved in 2001), and they were removed and restored. The Swinden and Bolotowsky murals were reinstalled at the new Cornell Tech campus which opened in 2017; the Rugolo mural awaits a place in a future building. Both the Swinden and Bolotowsky murals at Williamsburg had also been ‘lost’ under layers of paint and were rediscovered in the 1980s; removed and restored, they are on display at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

Credits: Photo of hospital and blueprint courtesy of the Collection of the Public Design Commission of the City of New York. Photos of the mural by Deborah Gardner, Roosevelt House.

Ilya Bolotowsky

Ilya Bolotowsky (1907–1981). Abstraction. 1942. Day Room Mural, Hospital for Chronic Disease on Welfare Island (later Goldwater Hospital, Roosevelt Island). Now installed in the Bloomberg Building on the Cornell Tech Campus, Roosevelt Island. 303 sq. ft.  Each. 7 feet tall.

Ilya Bolotowsky was born in St. Petersburg, Russia. During his childhood his family moved to Baku, then part of the Russian Empire, which they fled after the Russian Revolution, settling in Constantinople and then in New York in 1923. He studied at the National Academy of Design, worked as a textile designer, and then went to Europe for almost a year to see Old Masters and survey what was new. He was attracted to abstract art, influenced in part by the style of the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, and would become a founder of the American Abstract Artists a few years later.  In 1934 he was hired through the Public Works of Art Project and then the Teaching Division of the Federal Art Project. He switched to the Mural Division after his work was reviewed by its director, Burgoyne Diller, who was an abstract painter himself. Bolotowsky was thrilled to be working: “We were very happy to have a chance to give all of our time to painting.  We were not bothered because of our styles and the results of course were quite fantastic.” He was first assigned a mural at the new Williamsburg Houses in Brooklyn, along with Albert Swinden and two other artists. Choosing abstract artists for that site must have seemed appropriate because the buildings, designed by William Lescaze, were much more contemporary in design than at the city’s other public housing projects.

Bolotowsky’s second mural assignment was at the Chronic Disease Hospital on Welfare Island. Like Albert Swinden, he designed a mural for a day room with a somewhat more geometric pattern compared to Swinden’s work. He also did a mural for the Hall of Medical Science in the Health Building at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Bolotowsky labeled his style “neoplasticism” but during the 1930s he continued to experiment with new stylistic dimensions, a habit he continued the rest of his life. During World War II he served with the Army Air Corps. He spent the remainder of his career teaching at a number of colleges, painting, and exploring new artistic media, including sculpture, film, and playwriting.

Like Swinden, Bolotowsky saw his two FAP murals rescued from neglect. A visitor to Williamsburg rediscovered Bolotowsky’s mural when he saw it bleeding through the wall paint in 1976 and showed a sketch to the artist who identified it as his work. But it would not be until 1988 that all the Williamsburg murals were rescued and restored and then placed on long-term loan at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. His Roosevelt Island mural was recovered and restored in 2001, then removed in 2012 and restored again, and reinstalled on the Cornell Tech Campus.

Credits: Photo of the room model courtesy of the Collection of the Public Design Commission of the City of New York. Photo of the mural by Rick Luftglass, Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund.

Ilya Bolotowsky — In The Artist’s Words

I have had ready-made bogeyman, the Academy, to rebel against, and so my work gradually worked towards more or less impressionist style and then more expressionist. And then I tried cubism on my own. And finally I went into complete abstraction. In other words, by little, gradual steps, I got into the modern movement. My beginnings in complete abstraction were a little before 1933, and finally in 1933 it became quite pronounced, although some of my work at that time that were considered extreme abstractions nowadays would be considered semi-abstractions. The idea of styles changes. I saw some of the Mondrians in the Gallatin Collection at New York University . . ..  And he had a strong effect on me. I guess it must have been quite magnetic.

While neoplastic painters do not stress the personal touch at all like artists of the other styles. Especially, let’s say, an action painter, the personal touch, the personal handwriting is extremely important, the twist of the brush or the way the paint is either over-full and drips or it’s scratchy and not full enough – all this contributes to the personal touch. In neoplastic painting, all this is of no importance at all because you strive towards a certain absolute perfection. And luckily, you can never achieve it; otherwise, you would simply paint one picture and stop. And since you’re only human, and the absolute is a neoplatonic idea, we can keep on painting in a substantive direction over our lifetime and still be able to go on and on.

I would say for a younger artist, the best thing is to absolutely insist on their independence, whether they are right or wrong, and to continue experimenting and to beware of any bandwagons, and certainly not to shy away from any promotion from any collectors and museums, but to take all this with a grain of salt and to use it to their best advantage, but not to hold on very tight, and to be still independent, to grab any such help, but irreverently, and to proceed with their experiments, whether they are popular or not. Anything else, I don’t think would be valid and wise

Credit: Oral history interview with Ilya Bolotowsky, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1967.

Abstract Art

Mayor LaGuardia attended an exhibition at the Federal Art Gallery and was quoted as saying about abstract art, “I am as conservative in my art as I am progressive in my politics.”

Lee Krasner

I was in the abstract division of the Mural project so that there was very little work for abstract artists there. By and large they wanted things like “The History of Navigation.” But one of the administrators, Burgoyne Diller, succeeded in getting WNYC to give space for abstract murals which meant you didn’t have that kind of qualification but that was a rare exception.

Ilya Bolotowsky

At a time when critics were all set against abstract art, the Modern Museum (MOMA) … was very much afraid to go into the extremes in art in those days. And somehow, if it concerned Europeans, the Modern Museum was much more receptive to the latest developments. But when it was the Americans, they preferred to be more or less regional or social-scene.

And in general the people of course didn’t even know what it was about.  The scale of the work was like nothing seen before. Boldness and experimentation, the size of the canvases, and the amount of production.  It was the mural project that gave us the chance to realize our possibilities on a very large scale. I don’t know how people reacted. They didn’t know exactly how to react to this type of style. It was so very new. Don’t forget many people felt that art must represent the American spirit and I think our art work of the series might finally be accepted as a true American spirit. And it takes a little time but that’s the way it is in art.

Artist quotes are drawn from: Artists at Work: A Film on the New Deal Art Projects, Mary Lance, Producer and Director, New Deal Films, 1981.

Hospital Murals: American Life

David Margolis

David Margolis (1911–2003), Materials Of Relaxation, 1937–41. Bellevue Administrative Hospital Building. Now NYS Health + Hospitals/Bellevue, Manhattan.

David Margolis was born in Russia (now Ukraine) and moved to the United States (after a stop in Canada) with his mother and siblings in 1930. They had fled the strengthened repression of the Communist state after the ascendancy of Joseph Stalin, and the memories of the anti-Semitic pogrom that had killed Margolis’ father when he was eight years old. His art studies had begun in Odessa and continued, first in Montreal, and then at the National Academy of Design and at the Art Students League in New York. Like several other young Federal Art Project artists, he assisted the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera at Rockefeller Center who mentored him in technique and also suggested that he could get to know America better by reading the journals of Lewis and Clark, and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. His first FAP mural was an historical scene for Samuel Tilden High School in Brooklyn (1935). In 1937 he became one of thirteen artists selected by the Federal Art Project to paint murals in two buildings at Bellevue Hospital, the oldest hospital in the nation, tracing its origins to 1736.

With his experience, Margolis was asked to design and supervise a new mural for the rotunda of the Bellevue Administrative Building. From 1937 to 1941 he and his assistants painted nine large panels taking the viewer from the Stone Age to the Steel Age. He recalled this exciting time in a 1994 interview with a New York Times reporter:

I painted all of them from 1937 to 1941…I had two other painters working with me. I was paid just $26.50 a week, but it was wonderful. I was here weekends, nights. I was painting in a place of distress. All around me, it was like it is today. So many people, so much drama. Life, death. Crying, screaming and also laughing. And in the middle I was painting murals that told the story of human progress. Nature. Agriculture. Industry. And the central panels by the doorway representing Construction, Destruction and Reconstruction. Remember, it was the Depression.

In his six contemporary scenes he celebrated family, work, culture, and medical science, and included African Americans intermingled in five of those scenes, depictions of such interracial harmony somewhat unusual for New Deal murals.  His topics fit in with the desire of the FAP program leaders to infuse the murals with American history and ideals. As he noted in his application to the Municipal Art Commission, “The purpose of this mural is to present life from a productive and happy point of view. This is carried out by featuring sunshine, nutritious food, sanitary living, and recreation.” And like many artists before him, he populated his pictures with people who were dear to him:

I put my mother and father and the small dog I had in Odessa in the one about recreation and entertainment. I put some of the doctors I knew, the nurses. There was a man named Lester. He went to Spain to fight Franco, and I said I would paint him when he came back. He came back wounded.

He finished this work on the eve of World War II during which time he designed posters and camouflage.  In 1945 he found that his murals had disappeared because of a renovation at the hospital that sealed off the area for storage. While carrying that disappointment, he continued as a painter and sculptor till the end of his life.

But more than a decade before his death, his murals were rediscovered as plans were made to undo the mistakes of the past and reopen the area where they were located. Tests revealed that in spite of several coats of paint over the murals, they had survived because Margolis had finished them with a protective coat of wax. He was found and brought back to restore them with the help of assistants. During the first months of joyful restoration work, he told the Times reporter, “It is like finding out that what you thought was dead is alive. It is like tasting the wine of your youth. It’s like finding lost friends.” The project took almost a year, and was completed in 1995.

Credits: Artist statement and photographs of model and original installation, courtesy Collection of the Public Design Commission of the City of New York.  Restored mural photos by Thomas Loof provided by NYC Health + Hospitals. Picture of Margolis working on mural, May 29, 1940, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Photo of hospital administrative building, Drawing of Psychopathic [psychiatric] building, 1927, Department of Public Charities and Hospitals Collection, NYC Municipal Archives.

A Bellevue Doctor Talks To David Margolis

In 2022, Dr. Lewis Goldfrank, formerly head of the Emergency Room at Bellevue (and still practicing there), recalled chatting Margolis as he worked on restoring his mural.

I spoke with David Margolis about 30 years ago and found him greatly pleased with the importance of his project -initially and in the reconstruction phase.

He had great pride in working with the Mexican muralists.

As he developed the mural following his recent arrival in America he was overwhelmed by the diversity of people in America. He had only seen white people in Russia. He filled his murals with people of color as he saw the parade of diversity in the halls of Bellevue.

He feared his initial images would be destroyed and kept the original drawings safely for the future. He saw such chaos in the halls of Bellevue that he covered his initial works with bee’s wax which saved a good part and the saved drawings allowed him to faithfully reproduce his primary efforts.

He talked about the musical performances in the court yard and the Circus visiting for Bellevue’s children with great amazement.  In the crowd in one of the last images he placed his sister and her new boyfriend who had gone off to WWII.

Source: Conversation and email with Deborah Gardner, Roosevelt House, 2022.

Materials Of Relaxation – In The Artist’s Words

David Margolis, Artist, Bellevue Hospital, Manhattan, Administrative Building, Patients’ Waiting Rooms, Pavilions C and D. Submission to Art Commission of the City of New York, February 1939. 900 sq. ft. Secco fresco.

The purpose of this mural is to present life from a productive and happy point of view. This is carried out by featuring sunshine, nutritious food, sanitary living, and recreation. The composition was designed to satisfy architectural requirements. I collaborated with Dr. A Solomon for medical information and Mr. Ernest Robson, chemist, for industrial chemical information.

Panel I: Earth, Evolution of life and man.

Details: Volcanism, lava eruption, early plant and mammal life, primitive man, stone and bronze civilization, discovery of fire, Aztec architecture, primitive agriculture.

Panel II:  Scientific Medicine dispelling superstition.

Details: Discovery of oxygen, microscopic respirator, X-Ray surgery, horticulture.

Panel III: Technical and Sanitary Agriculture.

Details: Milking machines, modern barns, tractor, harrow, corn fields, grain elevators.

Panel IV:  Canning industry, Water and steam made vacuum.

Details: Conveyor, metal vat, cans, packers, fishing boat, sea.

Panel V:  The Citizen’s Family.

Details: Symbolic Mother and child. Farmer returning home to family. Factory worker, father and son leaving home in the morning. Industrial background.

Panel VI:  Steel industry.

Details: Blast furnace, skyscraper construction, electric conduits.

Panel VII: Cement industry.

Details: Kiln. Stone crusher. cement mixers, sand bags. labor.

Panel VIII: Glass industry.

Details: Glass blowing. Glass rolling. Glass pouring, glass construction.

Panel IX: Recreation.

Details: Literature, art, architecture and landscape gardening, park and playground development, open air library, sports.

Credits: Artist statement and photographs of model and original installation, courtesy Collection of the Public Design Commission of the City of New York.  Restored mural photos by Thomas Loof provided by NYC Health + Hospitals. Picture of Margolis working on mural, May 29, 1940, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Photo of hospital administrative building, Drawing of Psychopathic [psychiatric] building, 1927, Department of Public Charities and Hospitals Collection, NYC Municipal Archives.

Hospital Murals: Entertaining Children

Abram Champanier

Abram Champanier (1896–1960). Alice in Wonderland Visiting New York. 1935–1938. Extant. Originally 16 panels. Oil on canvas. Panels approximately 7 ft. tall. 310 sq. ft. Originally installed at Gouverneur Hospital. Now at New York City Health + Hospitals various locations.

Abram Champanier [aka Abram August Shampanier] was born in Poland, emigrated with his family to the United States, and became a naturalized citizen. He studied at the Art Students League of New York and went on to paint portraits and murals. He received private commissions for murals in New York apartments and hotels, including the Waldorf-Astoria, office buildings, the New York Athletic Club, and theaters; he also painted murals in Albany, Philadelphia, and Palm Beach. He was assigned by the Federal Art Project to paint murals at DeWitt Clinton High School, the New York City Parks Department, and Gouverneur Hospital.  He reported painting a 1,900-foot mural on the exterior of the Spanish Pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York but little documentation of this project has been found. Champanier experimented with a variety of styles starting in the late 1940s, and founded an art school in Kingston, New York. During World War II, he worked for the Curtiss-Wright Corporation in the Propeller Division making graphic illustrations. At the time he told a reporter that he had gained from this experience “a mechanical outlook which he intends to incorporate in his future projects,” and he did, naming it “Staccatoism.” Once the war was over he returned to painting and exhibiting his work

Abram Champanier, Alice in Wonderland Visiting New York. 1935–1938. Extant. Originally 16 panels. Oil on canvas. Panels approximately 7 ft. tall. 310 sq. ft. Originally installed at Gouverneur Hospital. Now at New York City Health + Hospitals various locations.

Alice Steps Out of Her Book

Alice at the New York Public Library

Alice at the Central Park Zoo

Alice at Coney Island

Alice Flies Over the East River Bridges

Alice and Friends Return to Their Books

Abram Champanier painted one of the most vibrant FAP murals, Alice in Wonderland Visiting New York, for the pediatric ward in Gouverneur Hospital. It is an extraordinary re-imagining of one of the most famous books in children’s literature, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) by Lewis Carroll. The sixteen Alice murals covered the walls of the ward where young patients with tuberculosis often stayed for months.  In addition to the locations displayed in these panels, Alice also visited the subway, Liberty Island, The Empire State Building, the harbor, and the new French ocean liner, the Normandie.

Gouverneur Hospital opened as a small clinic in 1885 to handle emergencies in the tenement district close to Water Street at Gouverneur Slip. The health needs in the poor and often violent neighborhood were so great that a new building was added by 1897 and then a second well-equipped facility was completed by 1910. Gouverneur had an early tuberculosis ward where its exterior balconies gave the patients access to the fresh air that was then part of the treatment. It was the first public hospital to hire a woman doctor for its ambulance service, and in 1940 one of its doctors created a pre-paid medical plan for the residents of the nearby public housing project. The hospital was outdated by the 1960s and while local groups struggled to save it, was finally closed and replaced at 227 Madison Street in the early 1970s.

When the derelict building was sold in 1980 by the city to a developer who began demolition in 1981, “a dramatic 11^th hour rescue” of the murals was organized by staff of the New York City Landmarks Commission and the Art Commission and led by conservator Alan Farancz who reported “racing the bulldozer.” Only one of the sixteen mural panels could not be saved.  The developer abandoned the property and it was later sold to a nonprofit group that finally opened “Gouverneur Court” in 1994, providing housing and social services for low income people with physical and mental health problems.

Photo credits: Historical photos courtesy Collection of the Public Design Commission of the City of New York; contemporary photo of the hospital; photos of the murals by Conservator Denise Whitbeck, Farancz Conservation Studio. Conservation by Farancz Painting Conservation Studio and Foreground Conservation and Decorative Arts.

Frank Godwin

Frank Godwin (1889–1959), 1932–33, Fairy Tales and Circus, Kings County Hospital (Now NYC Health + Hospitals/Kings County). Brooklyn. Extant.

Godwin was a talented artist whose career encompassed journalism, comic strips, illustrations for magazines and books, and painting murals.  He studied at the Art Students League in New York and he was influenced by N.C. Wyeth and other artists of the “Golden Age of Illustration.” His illustrations were comparably enchanting for books such Robert Lewis Stevens’ Treasure Island and Kidnapped, and for volumes on Robin Hood, King Arthur and tales from Shakespeare. This panel referring to the story of the Pied Piper was one of many that filled the walls of a children’s ward and adjacent spaces. Although this set of murals was completed for the new Kings County building before the New Deal art program, they demonstrate that the medical care for children was evolving to help them recover by creating an environment where their emotional needs would be addressed as adjuncts to their medical therapy. This approach would be embraced by many New Deal mural artists.

Credit: Photograph courtesy of Larissa Trinder, NYC Health + Hospitals.

 Albert S. Kelly

Albert S. Kelly (1909–1974). 1938. The Circus (or Circus Parade). Lincoln Hospital (now NYC Health + Hospitals/Lincoln). Bronx.

The circus and fairy tales were popular themes for childrens’ wards. Artists hired by the Federal Art Project were frequently commissioned to paint all the walls in a room and Kelly’s panel was one of twelve making up a mural to entertain young patients.  Little is known about Kelly’s career though he apparently worked in several artistic fields, including etchings. Lincoln Hospital moved to a new building in 1976 and the building with Kelly’s murals was demolished over 30 years later so the murals are presumed lost.

Credit: Photograph courtesy of the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Murals At A Care Institution:
Respecting Retired Workers at the New York City Farm Colony

The Farm Colony. The New York City Farm Colony originated in 1829 when approximately 100 acres of farmland were purchased by Richmond County officials so “the poor could earn their subsidence by their own labor.”  The crops grown on the farm not only fed those who lived there but eventually were supplied to neighboring public institutions. A century later the Farm continued as a residential facility for the indigent. Although work was no longer required, people who sought shelter there still had to take an oath declaring themselves paupers. By the early 1930s, there were about 1400 elderly residents living in seven dormitory buildings with many men spending their days in large workshops where crafts were produced. With the creation of Social Security in the New Deal, benefits enabled people to live more independently, and the Farm’s population gradually decreased; by the 1950s it was a geriatric hospital and home which closed in 1975. By this time the Farm Colony was administratively part of the adjacent 379-acre Seaview Hospital complex and both were designated as a New York City Landmark Historic District in 1985.

Staten Island and the New Deal. Staten Island, the smallest borough in New York City with a 1930s population of just 166,000 people (in a city of over seven million) benefitted from the New Deal with a number of projects funded by the WPA. These included road and railroad work; new parks, golf courses, playgrounds, and recreational facilities like the Joseph Lyons Pool; and new buildings for the United States Marine Hospital, Curtis and New Dorp high schools, the Rosebank Quarantine Station, the Staten Island Zoo, and the new Children’s Hospital and a Nurses’ Residence at Seaview Hospital. There were also improvements to Fort Wadsworth, Borough Hall, Miller Field Airport, the Richmond County Courthouse, the Seaview Hospital, the civil and criminal courts, and the Staten Island Historical Society Museum, as well as money to pay for the construction of new ferry boats and two destroyers built at Staten Island shipyards.

The Federal Art Project. The Federal Art Project commissioned several mural projects on Staten Island, including murals for the new high schools, and in the grand lobby of the Borough Hall artist Frederick Charles Stahr painted thirteen large panels depicting events in Staten Island history (1940). Another major mural project was the assignment for two sets of murals at the New York City Farm Colony. There painters Charles V. Davis and Axel Horn would focus on the history of American economic development, engaging with the residents and honoring their labors. When the Farm Colony closed in 1975, the murals were moved to Sea View Hospital where they remained on display until 1988 when they were removed and exhibited by the NYC Health and Hospitals Corporation, and then returned to the hospital in 1989 and some years later they were put into storage.

Seaview Hospital, opened in 1913 and with a tuberculosis sanatorium added in 1917, had transitioned from being a TB hospital — after a cure was approved for the disease in the 1950s based on drug trials by Sea View doctors — to a nursing home and rehabilitation center, part of New York’s public hospital system. Retired staff from the hospital would be instrumental in having the murals restored and installed in 2013-2015 at the Richmond County Courthouse (aka Staten Island Supreme Court), a triumph for those civic activists who worked with the Staten Island Museum to put them before the public, fulfilling once again the mission of the Federal Art Project to bring art to the people.

Charles Vincent Davis

Charles Vincent Davis (1912–1967) Progress of American Industry, 1938.  Six Mural Panels at the Staten Island Farm Colony. 938. Painted in egg emulsion on a gesso ground, 225 sq. ft., each panel 114” high x 60” wide. West Workshop.

The life and work of Charles Davis were embedded in Chicago where he studied at the Art Institute and in classes at the Hull House Settlement. He was primarily an easel painter of Chicago scenes, telling an interviewer, “I have a deep sympathy for the people who live here. These people and the whole neighborhood have something to say. I want to paint real people and real places.” During the New Deal, his work was supported by the Federal Art Project through the Illinois Art Project and was exhibited nationally in a touring exhibition entitled “Art of the American Negro” (1940). He was a founder of, and taught at, the South Side Community Art Center, one of 100 such facilities funded by the Works Progress Administration through the FAP, and organized by the city’s African-American artists as a place where they could provide free classes and display their work as they often were excluded from mainstream art venues because of their race.  The Center was dedicated on May 7, 1941 by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt whose remarks were broadcast nationwide. Davis painted a few murals (probably sponsored by the FAP), now lost, for the George Cleveland Hall Public Library in Chicago, which had opened in 1932 in the heart of the African-American community and became a center for Black artists and writers. Davis may have received his commission for the Staten Island murals because of his experience with the Library, but returned to Chicago after completing the New York work. In a review of mural projects in a major exhibition in New York in May 1937, Edwin Alden Jewell, the main art critic of the New York Times, who did not give compliments lightly, wrote “There is strength in the panels by Charles Davis.”

While Davis honored the laborers who had plowed the fields, constructed buildings and railroads, and extracted the fuel that powered the steel plants, there was only one identifiable African-American workman (see Railroad Builders) in his murals although they too had similar roles in the American economy. Since he did not literally see that representation when he visited with the men in the Farm Colony, he may have decided to leave it out. At the time, Staten Island had a very small Black population, less than two percent or fewer than 3,000 people out of a total of about 165,000. Some of those few African Americans lived in Sandy Ground, a settlement that was inhabited by free Blacks in the late 18^th century and so possibly then the oldest such community in the nation. In photographs of the men in the Farm Colony workroom, there are no visible Black men. Given Davis’ deep commitment to portraying African-American life in Chicago, his decision could have been influenced by the controversy that had recently surrounded the depiction of African-American life in the Harlem Hospital murals.

When the murals by Davis and Axel Horn were completed they went through the typical sign-off process.  Given final approval by the Municipal Art Commission, they were officially ‘accepted’ on November 22, 1938, by the city’s Department of Hospitals at a ceremony attended by the Superintendent of the Farm Colony, Lawrence Dermody, and a representative of the Federal Art Project.

Credits: Picture of the workroom, artist’s statement, and captions, Collection of the Public Design Commission of the City of New York; pictures of the mural panels courtesy of the Staten Island Museum.

Charles V. Davis — In The Artist’s Words
Progress Of American Industry

Two large buildings well-lighted and spacious and used by the inmates of the colony as a general workshop for such handicraft work as rug making, hand weaving, broom making, and by several more expert individuals who carved small articles of furniture, made amusing knick-knacks of scrap metal, and fabricated furniture from scrap wood.

The fact that the inmates of the Farm Colony were during their best years wage workers of every trade and calling suggested that a series of mural panels depicting workers as performing the various tasks they once did would be worthwhile subject matter for such a place.

The average age of these inmates being about seventy years it seemed that the period of American industry between 1875-1905 would be most relevant. The generally advanced age of the inmates of the Farm Colony made their outlook on life backward rather than forward, reminiscent rather than sanguine. Considering this I hoped to suggest for them a feeling of joy in achievement and satisfaction at having taken part in the Progress of American Industry.

Selecting the more basic industries agriculture, lumbering, mining, transportation railroads, construction, and steel making, it was decided to make six panels 9’6” x 5’ depicting these industries’ mural in character, with figures actively engaged in their various tasks, and with sufficient realism to achieve some of the dignity that the ordered energy of useful labor has.

No special attempt at social criticism was made. The question for instance why the men who made the steel, plowed the land, felled the trees, and mined the coal, built the bridges and laid the railroads, should be spending their last days at Farm Colony was not asked, perhaps the very fact that they are is sufficient commentary.

No attempt has been made to be historically correct as to costume, the details of dress are however possible, the actions of the figures were considered as logical, possible, actions in connection with the work the figures are supposed to be doing. The color schemes are the local color of the object and costumes depicted, modified and modulated in the direction of harmony consistent with design.

Among the comments of the inmates of Farm Colony upon the murals being installed, was “they make the place more home like” and “I was a riveter for twenty years but we always used an eight-pound hammer, we never used one as heavy as that.” These and other comments by the inmates evidence a new found interest in their limited environment, a realization of a social function being performed by these murals is gratifying to this artist.

Agriculture

“Agriculture” shows a plowman in the foreground guiding a plow whose share turns over ground in which can be seen weeds and the litter of last season’s crop. A distant figure rides a corn planter the horses of which are about to descend over a gentle rise, and at the top of the design is a farm house, silo and barn, a herd of cows, and a stone fence, suggesting a part of N.Y. State. The general feeling of the composition, the swift movements and angular character of the lines, recalls the activity associated with springtime. The subject matter of all the panels depicting as they do, much machinery, and action in connection with tools and apparatus, involved a great deal of research which was carried out with the aid of my assistants as was also much of the drawing of details of figures from models supplied by the [Federal Art] project. (Charles Davis, 1938)

Mining

Mining” shows partly an underground scene in a mine in which one miner works a jack hammer drill while another pries at the rock with a crow bar, the cramped positions are usual in many mining operations. The above ground portion of the design represents the harsh structure of an old type wooden coal breaker, small dilapidated shacks of the kind built by mining companies for their workers, and in the distant background oil derricks; the landscape typifies a coal region in Pennsylvania. (Charles Davis, 1938)

Lumbering

“Lumbering” has in the lower part of the design a log being sawn by two men with a crosscut saw, against the log leans a double bitted ax, and on the ground are wedges for freeing the saw in the cut.  The central part of the panel shows the two “Fallers” engaged in making with axes the undercut in a standing tree; details of the background are a logging railroad, a partial view of a lumber mill with trash burner, piles of sawn lumber, and on the edge of a forest is a donkey engine used in skidding logs through the woods. (Charles Davis, 1938)

Steel Workers

“The Steel Workers” showing as the principal activity two men, their bodies lit by the glow from a large ingot they are engaged in turning preparatory to repassing it through the rolls of a rolling mill a part of which appears at the right; streams of water running on the rolls to cool the rollers are also shown. The details of the structure are approximately like such a machine in use about the years 1870-1890. In the middle of the design two men are forging a heavy bar in a steam hammer, and to the left appears a large ladle of molten metal being poured or “teemed” into ingot moulds standing on a train of small cars or “bogies,” and beyond is the front of a blast furnace from which a stream of molten iron is running into moulds on the floor.  Thus in one panel are depicted four of the main processes in the making of steel. In order to dramatize the action and for purposes of design some liberties have been taken. The machinery and apparatus in steel works is so ponderous in comparison with the workers, who are comparatively few in number, that their actions would appear puny and insignificant if strict realism were observed. (Charles Davis, 1938)

Railroad Builders

 “The Railroad Builders” shows four workers engaged in laying a piece of track [and] one kneeling figure holds a spike in position while a negro worker wields a spike maul [while] another figure bolts up the rail ends with a long wrench, and the rear-most worker carries a measuring bar to gauge the width of the track.  The landscape represents scenery of a mountainous character, perhaps the Rockies, and in the distance an engine with a wood burner stack used at least to the eighties [1880s], pulls a train across a trestle bridge, of timber, as were most of the early railroad bridges. (Charles Davis, 1938)

Builders

The building of the Brooklyn Bridge and one of the city elevated lines is the subject in the sixth and last panel entitled the “Builders.” A steel beam runs diagonally across the design, on which are seated two figures about to finish the head of a rivet, one holds a set hammer, while the nearer figure is about to strike a blow with a heavy riveting hammer. The movement of the design is continued upward by another diagonal made by the eye bar girder reminiscent of the Sixth Avenue Elevated, and above this line a group of workers are shown building the Brooklyn tower of the Brooklyn Bridge. A laborer carries a hod on his shoulder, a stone mason handles a trowel and level, and another worker holds a rope. A crane boom repeats the diagonal of the El structure and in the distance appears the Manhattan tower of the bridge partly complete, the East River with barges and sailing ships, a sense of activity is continued into the top of the design by high white clouds in the sky. One of the old-fashioned lunch boxes or dinner pails with a cup set in the lid gives interest to the foreground and indicates the period as does the Derby hat of one worker and moustache of another. (Charles Davis, 1938)

Axel Horn

Axel Horn (1913–2001). The Economic Pursuits of the Early American Settlers. Five Mural Panels at the Staten Island Farm Colony. East Workshop. Statement to the Art Commission, 1938. Painted in egg tempera on gesso, each panel 114” high x 60” wide, 225 sq. ft.

A native New Yorker, Axel Horn [previously known as Axel Horr] enrolled in the Art Students League of New York where he studied with Thomas Hart Benton, a skilled mural painter. Horn then gained additional proficiency in that medium by being among the first painters to participate in a 1936 workshop in New York led by the prominent Mexican mural painter David Alfaro Siqueiros. Horn received a number of mural assignments through the Federal Art Project. In addition to those at the Farm Colony, in the late 1930s he also completed “Industrial Landscape” for the first floor waiting room in the new Psychiatric Building of Bellevue Hospital, and another at the Welfare Island Nurses Home. Through the Treasury Section of Fine Arts, he won competitions to paint murals at several post offices, in the village of Whitehall, New York, “Settlement of Skenesborough” (1940) and in Yellow Springs, Ohio, “Preparation for Lifework” (1941). After World War II, his career encompassed commercial design and exhibit projects, and then in the 1960s refocused to education and environmental programs, working in the United States and abroad, as well as teaching at the City College of New York, CUNY.  Throughout his life, Horn’s art included easel paintings, drawings, and sculpture, which he exhibited, and he also wrote poetry and books for children.

In recent years, the depiction of both Native Americans and African Americans in FAP murals has been the subject of controversy elsewhere in the U.S. There was a Native American presence in Staten Island that long predated 17^th-century settlement by the Europeans, but following conflict and a final treaty resolution they moved elsewhere during the 18^th-century.  The Native figures in Horn’s colonial era mural are physically substantial –like the peasants portrayed by the Mexican muralists — and maintain their dignity amongst the settlers even while bearing heavy bundles of trade goods.

Credits: Picture of the workroom and the artist’s statement, Collection of the Public Design Commission of the City of New York; picture of the artist at work, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; pictures of the mural panels courtesy of the Staten Island Museum.

Axel Horn — In The Artist’s Words
The Economic Pursuits Of The Early American Settlers

The Farm Colony is a home for aged and infirm men. These men in their prime were mainly laborers, mechanics, skilled tradesmen, etc.

The east workshop is very large and high. It is used as a craft house where men make rugs, toweling brooms, carve wood, paint sign pictures, etc. The work progresses in a very quiet, calm, slow way. The emphasis on work is not for the exploitation of finished articles, but to relieve the men’s need for work-expression.

Mural. The theme progressed slowly in keeping with the general character of the room. In combination with the panels planned for the west workshop for another artist, a single theme was arrived at — “Americans at Work.” The set for the east shop consisted of the “Economic Pursuits of the Early American Settlers.”

Treatment. The panels depend one on the other for the achievement of their compositional unity. At the same time, they may be viewed as separate entities. The colors are bright and cheerful. The series is treated in a purely decorative manner.

Indian Agriculture

The Colonists Build

Agriculture

Hunting

Trading

The Spirit Of Sea View

The Spirit of Sea View (2020), dedicated January 2021. Artist Yana Dimitrova. Sea View Hospital Rehabilitation Center and Home and Historic Site, Staten Island. Mural sponsored by the New York City Health + Hospitals Community Mural Project.

A new mural honoring the workers at the Sea View Hospital was painted by Anna Dimitrova in 2020. The mural has four panels: 1. the early Farm Colony, 2. the 20^th -century hospital treating tuberculosis patients and featuring the African-American nurses who cared for them, the “Black Angels,” 3. the doctors testing a cure for TB at the hospital, and 4. the current patients.  Shown here is the panel depicting the “The Black Angels,” representing the mostly African-American nursing staff at the Sea View Tuberculosis Hospital. “The majority of the nurses there were Black because they couldn’t get jobs in other areas [because of racial discrimination],” recalled Virginia Allen (1931–), the last living Angel who worked at Sea View from 1947–1957, “even though they were very well trained with degrees. White nurses did not apply for these jobs because of the danger of catching tuberculosis. It was a very high-risk job.” Ms. Allen, whose career encompassed nursing children at Sea View and other city hospitals, labor relations, and civic activism joined the effort to get the Davis and Horn murals out of storage. She collaborated with Jane Lyons (1928–2013), former executive director of Sea View Hospital, who leveraged her role on the Board of the Staten Island Museum to recruit allies in her ultimately successful campaign to restore the murals and put them on public display. The photograph shows Ms. Allen with the artist at the dedication of the new mural in 2021.

Yana Dimitrova (1983–) studied painting, printmaking, and sculpture in Bulgaria before immigrating to the US in 2002 where she received a BFA and MFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design, and later an MA from Parsons School of Design where she now teaches.  Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. She has been involved with a number of large scale mural projects including leading a collaborative mural project in Brooklyn at the Sunset Park Family Health Center.

Credit: Photographs of the mural by Nicholas Knight courtesy of New York City Health + Hospitals Community Mural Project.  Virginia Allen interview courtesy of the Staten Island Museum online exhibit, “Apart Together: The ‘Black Angels’ Nurses of Seaview Hospital.”

Harlem Hospital And African-American Artists

Harlem Hospital And Its Mural Controversy, 1936

The original Harlem Hospital opened in 1887 in an old mansion at 120^th Street and the East River with a limited capacity to hold patients temporarily before transfer to the institutions on Wards and Randall’s Islands or Bellevue Hospital. It was replaced in 1907 by a fully-equipped hospital with 150 beds at the present location on Lenox Avenue, 136–137^th Street. Soon additions were built, a Nurses Residence was constructed in 1915 and a training school for African American nurses – unable to be educated elsewhere — established in 1923. In 1919 the first African-American staff doctor had been hired, Dr. Louis T. Wright, who had the distinction of being the first at any city hospital.  Although the numbers of African-American nurses increased gradually, most professional staff remained white, with African-American staff relegated to menial jobs. The New Deal Works Progress Administration would fund another addition to the hospital.

By 1930, Central Harlem was 70 percent African American — 320,000 people crammed into crowded old tenements where there were high rates of tuberculosis and other communicable diseases, leading to the need for more medical services and a larger hospital. An array of African-American institutions — churches, newspapers, civil rights, civic, cultural and social groups, and entertainment venues were well established, and the flourishing of arts and letters known as the Harlem Renaissance was well under way.  And yet none of this was reflected in the makeup of Harlem Hospital. An angry article from a decade later could have been published in the mid-1930s:

The Negro nurses are Jim-crowed; that the department of surgery in particular needs a thorough overhauling; that the clinic is woefully understaffed; that no Negro is included on the staff of the medical section of the Office of Civilian Defense…that qualified Negro doctors are kept out of city hospitals; that white doctors of lesser qualifications are thrust upon Harlem Hospital, that voluntary hospitals surrounding the Harlem area send their own ambulances with accident cases past their doors, over to Harlem, rather than admit the Negro victims; and then people talk about the negro’s high death rate. Forced to live in a ghetto, victimized by exploitation, denied the most fundamental opportunities for living-with minimum needs inadequately met — what more can be expected?  [The People’s Voice, 1942]

This situation, and the simmering feelings of rage from the deadly Harlem Riots of March 1935, was the backdrop for the confrontation between the Superintendent of Harlem Hospital, Dr. Lawrence T. Dermody, and the artists hired in 1936 by the Federal Art Project to prepare murals for the hospital.

Seven artists, an unusually diverse group by gender and race, had been selected by the Federal Art project to paint murals at the hospital. There were four African-American women — Georgette Seabrooke, Elba Lightfoot, Sara Murrell, and Selma Day — and three men — Italian-American Alfred Crimi, and African-American painters Charles Alston and Vertis Hayes.  It was the first time a group of African-American artists had been hired by the FAP for a major project.

Their applications were submitted to the Art Commission in early January 1936 and by the end of the month several had been put on hold: “Withdrawn by order of Commissioner of Hospitals Sigismund S. Goldwater.”  On January 28 he wrote that the application for Vertis Hayes’ project — given preliminary approval on January 14 by the Art Commission — was:

. . . submitted with my signature. Action on this project was taken by me under a misapprehension as to the facts. I was led to believe that the matter had been discussed with the Superintendent and the Medical Board at Harlem and that they approved of the project, but I have since learned that this was not the case.

There are certain aspects of the project which make me feel very dubious about the advisability of its adoption, and I am writing to request that it be withdrawn immediately and not presented for formal adoption and execution until I have had an opportunity to look into the matter further. My present opinion is that something of an entirely different nature is required, and that the adoption of this project in its present form would lead to undesirable controversy.

Although a talented Commissioner of the City’s Department of Hospitals who had used federal New Deal funds to build and greatly improve and expand many services of New York’s municipal hospitals and clinics, in the matter of race Dr. Goldwater, along with Hospital Superintendent Dr. Dermody, seemed to share the prejudiced views of the era. Dermody approved three mural projects by Elba Lightfoot, “Toyland Parade,” Selma Day, “Fairy Tales,” and Alfred Crimi, “Modern Surgery and Anesthesia” but disapproved of the proposals by Seabrooke, “Recreation in Harlem,” Alston, “Magic in Medicine” and “Modern Medicine,”  Hayes, “Pursuit of Happiness,” and Murrell’s “Jungle Tales.”

Charles Alston, the supervisor of the project’s two dozen artists – comprising the lead artists and their assistants – became the spokesperson for the protest that would be organized to contest the rejection. He accused Dermody of racial discrimination and summarized the doctor’s objections as reported by the New York Times: “That the murals had too much Negro matter, that the Negroes might not form the greater part of the community twenty-five years hence, that the Negroes in the community would object to Negro subject matter in the murals, and that the hospital was not a Negro hospital but a city institution, and that it should not be singled out for treatment with Negro subject matter.” In response Dermody said the murals “were not suitable for display in a hospital, any hospital,” and denied having approved Crimi’s mural because it only had white medical personnel in it. Alston explained, “So we decided to fight it. With the quiet help of a few of the more enlightened medical men in the hospital who operated behind the scenes, we made a big thing out of this. I don’t think the superintendent expected it to blow up into such a thing. We brought the Commissioner [on board] and we finally won out, and the mural went up.”

Alston circulated a letter detailing the situation to the city’s newspapers, the FAP leaders, and Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. The artists of the Harlem Artists’ Guild, the interracial Artists Union, civic leaders of the Mayor’s Committee investigating the riots of the previous year, and other prominent New Yorkers supported the Harlem artists. A committee appointed to look into the matter representing Harlem leaders endorsed the content stating, “There is no offense to Negroes in these paintings.”  Dr. Dermody’s decision was overturned.  With very few changes to their designs, three of the artists — Alston, Hayes and Seabrooke — quickly submitted new applications to the Art Commission and they were given preliminary approval; Murrell’s application was not completed for Harlem Hospital and may have been moved to a different hospital.  Most were finished by early 1938.

The murals by Alston, Crimi, Hayes, and Seabrooke were rescued before the demolition of the buildings where they had been installed, restored, and placed on view in a new mural pavilion. In addition, Vertis Hayes’ “Pursuit of Happiness” has been copied into the enormous glass facade of the pavilion, where it is visible to all.

Credits and note: Photos of the murals in the hospital and the Art Commission application and Goldwater letter courtesy of the Collection of the Public Design Commission of the City of New York. Photos of the restored murals by Nicholas Knight.  Murals restored by Evergreen Architectural Arts. Newspaper article 1942, The People’s Voice founded by Adam Clayton Powell Jr. in 1941. Charles Alston Oral History Interview 1965, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. “Race Bias Charged by Negro Artists,” New York Times, February 22, 1936, p.13. It is not known what happened to the Day and Lightfoot murals nor that of the talented Sara Murrell (1915-1987).

Vertis Hayes: History of a People

Vertis Hayes (1911–2000). Pursuit of Happiness. Harlem Hospital, Nurses’ Residence Main Corridor, 1936–38.  New York City Health + Hospitals/Harlem. Submission to Art Commission of the City of New York, December 14, 1937. 800 sq. ft. Six panels each 16’x 8’, one panel 9’x 8’, and one arch 9’x 8’. Oil on plaster and oil on canvas. Assistants: Morgan Smith and Elton Serrant.

Born in Georgia, Hayes left the region to study art, first at the Chicago Institute of Fine and Applied Arts and then in New York at the National Academy of Design.  He studied mural painting at the Art Students League and in private lessons with French-born artist Jean Charlot (1898–1979) who had learned fresco in Mexico in the 1920s by working with Diego Rivera painting murals. He was influenced by Rivera, Orozco and Siqueiros both in technique and their commitment to providing art for the people and passed this along to Hayes. Charlot was hired by the FAP to help with a very large mural project at the Straubenmiller Textile High School on West 18^th Street where there were several students and artists already at work; Charlot painted a section and apparently Hayes worked there as his assistant gaining practical experience. Thus Hayes was well positioned to design a large scale project when hired for the Harlem Hospital project. Hayes eight-section mural in the new Nurses Residence illustrated the African-American journey from Africa to the New World, the migration from the South to the North, and the movement from agricultural work to industrial jobs. He may well have been influenced in his imagery and sectional approach – from Africa to the present – by a four-part mural painted by Aaron Douglas Aspects of Negro Life (1934) at the 135^th branch of the New York Public Library, possibly the first African-American artist to be hired by a federal art program, in his case the Public Works of Art Program of the Civil Works Administration. Hayes work was exhibited in several shows in New York including the Harlem Artists’ Guild Show (1937) and he had his own solo gallery show. His growing reputation attracted interest from Memphis, Tennessee, and he was asked in 1938 to become the director of the new FAP-funded Community Art Center at LeMoyne College (an historically Black college). It was so successful that it became the Art Department of the college in 1940 and Hayes stayed on to teach there and at his own art school, and painted several murals in local institutions. In 1951 he relocated to Los Angeles where he continued teaching and his own career as an artist painting portraits and other subjects.

Credits: Photographs of the restored murals by Nicholas Knight. Historical photo and artist’s statement courtesy of the Collection of the Public Design Commission of the City of New York. Mural restored by Evergreen Architectural Arts.

Vertis Hayes — In The Artist’s Words
The Pursuit of Happiness

The title, “The Pursuit of Happiness,” depicts phases of life among Negro people. The arch serves as a frontispiece symbolizing African culture one side and American culture on the other, this tying up the series of designs that are on either side of a half section of the corridor.

The first panel showing a primitive African village scene and the routine of its people is intended to show their interdependence toward a common end.

The second panel is a continuation of the first portraying a spiritual side of primitive African life.

The third panel is a portrayal of early American plantation life with its regimented huts along with the cotton and tobacco to illustrate the fecundity of its soil, its river and its people.

The fourth is situated at the end of the corridor serving architecturally to assist a design that is intended to display the transition of the Negro from agriculture to industry or from rural to urban life.

The fifth panel which is designed around a huge arch doorway is intended to illustrate pursuits of untrained people in urban life.

The sixth panel displays some of the skills in professional pursuits.

The seventh panel is devoted to religion and drama and is divided by a stone wall.

These two factors have been used here because they serve as tangible monuments to a spiritual people whose difficulties might have been greater without that most human of all elements in their pursuit of happiness.

Healers at Work

Alfred D. Crimi

Alfred D. Crimi (1900–1994). Modern Surgery and Anesthesia (aka Preventative Medicine and Surgery). 1936. Fresco. 250 sq. ft. Extant. Harlem Hospital, now New York City Health + Hospital/Harlem.

Like many other New Deal artists in New York, Alfred Crimi was an immigrant. Born in Sicily, he was brought to the United States by his parents in 1900, later becoming a citizen. He grew up in East Harlem, studied art at the National Academy of Design, and won a fellowship to study at the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design in New York, founded in 1916 to emulate the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris where he began his mural studies. He returned to Rome, Italy, in 1929 to study fresco and encaustic painting techniques.  With the onset of the Depression, he received an assignment from the Public Works of Art Project to paint a mural at the Open Air Aquarium in Key West, Florida (1935). Following that he was hired by Federal Art Project in New York to paint a mural at Harlem Hospital. His initial plan was five fresco panels on the history of medicine for arched recesses in the Medical Board Conference Room at the Hospital — Primitive Cure, Egyptian Embalming, The Resurrectionist, Quack Doctors, and Modern Surgery and Anesthesia. To prepare, he observed and sketched doctors and nurses during several operations at the new Kings County Hospital, fascinated by what he termed “the psychological aspect created by the coordinated orchestration of the participants.”Crimi was the only white artist selected for the hospital project but even though his proposal was passed readily by the Art Commission, he felt the brunt of Hospital Director Dermody’s disdain for government artists whom Crimi claimed he termed “dole collectors and free loaders.” On a personal level, Crimi got along well with the other artists on the project, advising those without previous mural experience, and he remained a friend of Charles Alston. Crimi was the only artist to use fresco at the hospital while the other murals were oil paint on canvas.

After completing only one panel, “Modern Surgery and Anesthesia,” he went to Washington DC, having won a competition to paint two large murals at the Washington DC Post Office (now the Clinton Federal Building). There he painted “Transportation of Mail” and “Post Office Work Room.” He reportedly worked 14 hours a day on these using the fresco technique. He enjoyed talking with the many workers who walked by and asked about his work. And through the Section on Painting and Sculpture, Treasury Department, he received contracts to paint “Work, Religion and Education” for the Northampton, Massachusetts Post Office, and “Anthony Wayne, General, Surveyor, and Gentleman Farmer” for the Wayne, Pennsylvania, Post Office.

During World War II, Crimi worked for the Sperry Gyroscope Division on Long Island preparing three-dimensional drawings of military weapons and other instruments for military training manuals. After the war he returned to his career as an artist, primarily with easel paintings and adding abstraction to his styles. He exhibited widely and won many awards. He taught art at the City College of New York and the Pratt Institute in New York and made a film, “The Making and Fascination of Fresco Painting.” He was appointed to a three-year term on the Municipal Art Commission (1958–1961).  In the 1960s he did some mural work and Venetian glass mosaics at two New York schools.

Like other mural painters of his generation, Crimi witnessed both the destruction — of a 1936 New York City church mural at the Rutgers Presbyterian Church — and preservation — the Northampton mural — of his work. But he was unsuccessful in assuring that his Harlem mural, and two by Charles Alston, would be properly cared for. In December 29, 1958 he wrote to the Art Commission that he had visited the hospital:

To my amazement, I found, both my mural and a set of two large panels painted by Charles Alston which are located in the 137^th Street entrance lobby, in a disgraceful state of neglect and badly in need of surface restoration. It is easy to imagine some such others in City-owned property that may be in a similar state of neglect.

He suggested that work be done to preserve the murals. The Art Commission reached out to the city’s Department of Public Works which in turn contacted Alston for an appraisal of his panels and an estimate on what it would cost to repair them. On February 13, 1959, Alston wrote,

I find that they are badly in need of cleaning and restoration. Large portions of the murals have been virtually obliterated by the accumulation of soot, dirt and stains over a period of almost 25 years. Apparently, non-professional attempts at cleaning the most damaged areas have been made at some time in the past. As a result, there are sections of the mural where subtleties of modelling have been lost or almost washed out because of improper cleaning techniques and materials. The panels themselves are in good condition. There are no tears or bad scratches, and no leakage or other water damage.

He estimated it would cost $1,500 [approximately $15,000–$16,000 in 2023] to clean and restore the panels (each 8 x 15 feet) and also recommended that a cover be placed over the radiators at the bottom of the murals, planned but never done, which would protect them in the future. On February 27, 1959, the Commissioner of Public Works wrote to the Art Commission that there is “no urgency” to restore the murals and wouldn’t comply with the request. It wasn’t until 1979 that a first restoration project was undertaken. Time passed and the murals needed additional work. Once rescued prior to demolition of the buildings, they were restored and installed in a new pavilion which opened in 2012.

Credits: The 1936 photo of Crimi’s mural in the hospital conference room and correspondence, Collection of the Public Design Commission of the City of New York; contemporary photo by Nicholas Knight. Mural restored by Evergreen Architectural Arts.

Charles Henry Alston

Charles Henry Alston (1907–1977). Charles H. Alston, Magic in Medicine and Modern Medicine, Harlem Hospital, Manhattan, New Women’s Pavilion Lobby, Submission to Art Commission of the City of New York, March 12, 1940. Two panels each 6’ x 17’. Oil on canvas.

Charles H. Alston was born in North Carolina but raised in New York City where from childhood he was drawing and painting. He was one of the few African-Americans to attend Columbia College (BA), and then Teachers College (MA), and in both institutions he studied art and took studio courses. He came of age as the Harlem Renaissance was nurturing literature and the arts and was influenced by the writers and artists, both painters and sculptors, who were incorporating themes of Black identity into their work, often drawing from African culture. There was, as he later recalled, “a certain awareness of African roots or of some spiritual or aesthetic affinity with the African background. There was an acceptance of and a working out of an African heritage on the part of artists of that period,” yet he believed that artists needed a strong foundation in the Western art canon to create effective political art, “as always behind this was a thorough and solid background in the aesthetic aspects of the art. It’s after the mastery of the elements of painting or printmaking that then you can speak out politically with great authority because you have such mastery of the tools involved.” Alston was sustained, as were many artists during the 1930s, with assignments from the Federal Art Project.

The Depression hit Harlem artists hard, probably more than it did white artists. Alston taught art classes at an after-school boys club, where he discovered a young Jacob Lawrence, already a talented artist. Artists found more work once the Works Progress Administration programs – including the Federal Art Project — were started, “…some as easel painters, some as teachers, and some — well — working in the various categories of art that they had. I think there were people doing prints, there were people doing watercolors, there were people doing murals, and there were people who were teaching.”

Alston is very well known for his role in the painting of murals at Harlem Hospital under the aegis of the Federal Art Project. It was a new field of practice for him, but he was keenly aware of the work of the Mexican muralists: “Orozco and Rivera were tremendous influences on all artists, black and white, in this

Country . …  As a matter of fact, I used to go down to Radio City [Rockefeller Center] when Rivera was painting the one they destroyed. And between his broken English and my broken French, we managed to communicate. And I was very much influenced by his mural work.” Alston was assigned as a supervisor on the Harlem Hospital mural project, overseeing 25 lead artists and their assistants who worked in several locations: a conference room, a pediatric ward, a nurses’ recreation room, and the lobby of the new pavilion.

When four of the seven original mural designs, including his, were rejected by the head of the hospital because they had too much “Negro” content, Alston orchestrated the response, going to the press and seeking the support of influential people to get this decision reversed: “I had a lot of references to Negro history in my mural . . . There were two panels facing each other; one panel was Primitive Medicine and one was Modern Medicine. In Primitive Medicine, I went back to witch doctor themes and whatnot; and in the Modern panel, I had a complete integration — racial integration — perhaps with some emphasis on the brown and black people in it because that was the character of the community . … I was very much interested at the time in African sculpture and in adapting certain of the technical aspects of that into my work. Practically all of my subject matter was related to the community, not in an aggressive, protest way, but just a statement of “this is it and this is the beauty of it.”  Alston’s allies prevailed and the mural designs were approved with very little change. His was finished in 1937 although he didn’t get final approval from the Art Commission until 1940. Nevertheless, he had pleasant memories of one member of the art commission, Ernest C. Peixotto, an experienced mural painter and president of the National Society of Mural Painters. He was usually on the review committees for mural applications: “He was certainly completely of the old school . . .  he was very sympathetic . . . and the few times that I did talk to him during the mural [debate], he was perfectly amenable to your ideas. He didn’t lay down the law or anything like that.”

Once Alston completed the mural, he traveled to the South for two years on a Rosenwald Fellowship and then returned to New York in 1940. During the war he worked for the Office of War Information and then afterwards went into commercial art before committing fully to a career as a painter.  He relished being a teacher and taught for many years at the Art Students League and at the City College of New York, CUNY. Later in life he added sculpture to his artistic portfolio.

Credits: Historical photos and statements, Collection of the Public Art Commission of the City of New York. Current mural photos by Nicholas Knight. Oral history interviews with Charles Henry Alston, 1965 and 1968, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, and “Artists at Work: A Film on the New Deal Arts Projects,” 1981, New Deal Films, Mary Lance, Producer and Director.

Charles H. Alston — In The Artist’s Words

We formed a little organization called the Harlem Artists Guild; and we used to meet and just discuss our own art problems. We were all pretty young . … We met and discussed the things that were important to us in those days. Through the organization, we were able to do one or two effective things beyond the local needs. For instance, we discovered that a lot was going on in the WPA that we weren’t getting the benefits of, you know . … We began bringing some pressure on them for more jobs, more jobs for the Negro artist; because they didn’t really know who the Negro artists were . … We made some protests. We got a committee together, and we pointed out that – not necessarily through any intent — there are a lot of people around who qualified and were not being accepted on this. We put pressure on them. We got practically every serious Negro artist in the community, who needed to be on the Project . … We got them on, plus we got a few more supervisorships.

One of the very important things of that period was that artists, for the first time, got some sense of an identity. Things were so bad that you had both artists who had no reputation as well as artists who had already begun to have a reputation involved in the thing. So younger artists had an opportunity to talk to the artists who were prominent. There was a democracy about the whole thing that was very rewarding, very beneficial. As I stated before, just going down to get your pay — which was a thing that didn’t have great dignity — you stood on a line and you waited your turn. Some of those days, by golly, in the wintertime were cold. You’d stand out in rain, or snow, or sleet, or cold. And you got to talking; you got to know people. As I say, I got to know [Arshile] Gorky. As you look back on it, these were valuable experiences. I think the fact that it provided a forum . … It provided a situation where artists got to know each other. It provided artists with a consciousness of being an artist and having problems. And, of course, out of that your Artists Union . … And a great number of the painters on the projects in New York, most of us were members of the Artists Union, which was an organization I suppose which would now be considered the left wing organization in its day. But it dealt with the problems of the artists and kept the Federal Projects on its toes about providing for the artists and raising standards and what not. You couldn’t escape the social implications of painting then.

(1965 and 1968, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.)

Charles H. Alston — In The Artist’s Words

I chose the medium, oil on canvas, because there is a possibility that if I worked directly on the wall, the walls would not stand up. Also, the technical department [of the FAP] advised me against it. I would rather have worked in tempera because it lends to more brilliancy of colors.

I chose the subject matter, Mystery in Magic — contrasted with Modern Science and Medicine — because I thought the comparison between the type of superstitions that have existed and still exist and attempted to show how ignorant they were, contrasted with modern science, and I might do a very good thing from an educational point of view and might offer excellent pictorial material. In the science panel I have attempted to show the different races working together on the same basis with an absolute lack of discrimination, illustrating the sheer objectivity of science. I have always been interested in primitive African culture and this gives me an opportunity to concentrate on it.

I should say that my mural will have both a functional and decorative purpose. I think there is an architectural fitness, in view of the fact that the mural was designed with the architecture in mind. The mural follows the arches of the building.

Since this mural was designed for the Lobby, I have not thought of the effect of color and design on the wall. However, I have attempted to use the colors that stimulate to pleasant memories.

It is hard to say what the reactions when the mural is finally completed will be. (Personally, I think people will be knocked off their feet. This, of course, is off the record, you understand.) I hope the people will be impressed and I think they will be. As yet there are no definite reactions.

(“Artists at Work: A Film on the New Deal Arts Projects,” 1981, New Deal Films, Mary Lance, Producer and Director.)

Georgette Seabrooke

Georgette Seabrooke (1916–2011). Recreation in Harlem. Nurses’ Residence Recreation Room, Harlem Hospital, 1937, 136 Street and Lenox Avenue, New York.  New York City Health + Hospitals/ Harlem). Oil on canvas. 108 sq. ft.

Seabrooke was four years old when her family moved from Charleston, South Carolina to New York City in 1920. She attended Washington Irving High School and also took art classes at the Harlem Art Workshop sponsored by the 135^th Street branch of the New York Public Library.  Jacob Lawrence was a classmate and instructors included sculptor Augusta Savage and painter Charles Alston. Her talent won her a place at the tuition-free Cooper Union School of Art where she was introduced to mural work by instructor John Steuart Curry and was awarded a painting prize. Even before graduation she was asked to design and paint a mural at Harlem Hospital, possibly recommended to the Federal Art Project by Alston or Savage.

She was the youngest of the seven painters assigned to the hospital. Given the gender bias at the time, it is not surprising that she was asked to paint a mural for the recreation room in the Nurses’ Residence. Along with her African-American colleagues, Vernon Hayes, Charles Alston, and Sarah Murrell, her plan to depict the neighborhood was initially rejected by the Municipal Art Commission at the request of the Hospital’s white director, who thought their proposed murals depicted too many African Americans and African-American history – although there were white people in Seabrooke’s preliminary drawings. She later recalled “The Superintendent of Hospitals saw a white neighborhood. We knew the neighborhood was changing. Most of the Black people were moving up from downtown.” After the rejection and the ensuing controversy, and the basic reinstatement of all the artists’ designs, she made only very minor revisions to her design.  Her delightful scene of home life and recreation in the Harlem community unfolded along a 19-foot wall. In her scenes of everyday life, she included people of all ages having fun, chatting, and visiting together, and people going about their work like a postman and a visiting nurse.

Seabrooke married, had three children, and continued to be an artist the rest of her life. She lived in Washington DC for 40 years where she secured advanced training to work as an art therapist and educator, and was active in many civic organizations. Her art was exhibited in numerous exhibitions and acquired by a number of American museums but her most famous work remains the mural at Harlem Hospital.

Credits: Historical photo and the artist’s statement, April 14, 1936 and May 11, 1937, Collection of the Public Design Commission of the City of New York. Contemporary photo by Nicholas Knight.Mural restored by Evergreen Architectural Arts.

Georgette Seabrooke — In The Artist’s Words

The completed mural in the Nurses’ Recreation Room (Penthouse), Nurses’ Home, Harlem Hospital, is my endeavor to paint scenes of community and professional life. The mural, which is nineteen feet, five inches wide by five and a half feet high and painted in oils on the wall, is an attempt through decoration and color to bring real subjects of interest to its audience.

The subject chosen, in accord with the type of room, is about recreational and enjoyable home and outdoor life.  Home life from which most activities evolve, is of foremost importance in the design, and through this women’s pleasurable duties in the home are shown.

There are many figures and happenings throughout but I have drawn them approximately of medium size in relation to the wall space and width of the room which is comparatively long and narrow. The subject matter which I find entertaining and human rather than seriously boring includes, reading from left to right: We look upon a bathing scene at the beach, an artist at the right sketching the group; next a choral group being warmly received by an audience on a little theatre stage.  Leaving this, there are two women gossiping, one from her window to the other in the street where two small boys are engaged in a playful fight. We reach the middle of the mural, with a family group including a mother and child and young girls and a visiting nurse are at leisure about a table at home, the nurse attending the baby.  From interior to exterior we see a flower vendor beneath the El trains selling his wares in front of a background of buildings. Below this scene we enter upon a dance floor where a couple and girl are making merry. As we approach the end, we see a postman delivering mail to a woman at her doorway, and lastly, a humorous group of kindergarten children at school.  Above this is at first a country outdoor scene showing girls enjoying an outdoor picnic.

If I have made the picture clear enough you can see that my attempt was to give the nurses something to look at, something which they partake in and find interesting rather than their own personal work which in a recreation room might not be as exciting as a subject apart.

As I said before, I designed this mural because I liked working on the design, my unlimited subject matter and composing and painting the scenes as a whole. A penthouse affords a good deal of light so my painting is shown to advantage atop the Nurses’ Home in their Recreation Room.

 Selma Day

Selma Day (1907-1994). Mother Goose Rhymes, Harlem Hospital, Manhattan, Children’s Medical Ward #7, Submission to the Art Commission of New York, December 1937. Oil on canvas. 573 sq. ft. No longer extant.

Selma Day was born in North Carolina and by 1920 was living in Harlem. She graduated from Brooklyn College, the city’s first coed public college, and was active in the Harlem art community as she began training to be an artist. In late 1930 she exhibited in the Annual Exposition of Women’s Art and Industries at the Ashland Place YWCA, in Brooklyn, an African-American unit of the national organization which had segregated branches in several other cities too. She was also part of the group of African-American artists in Harlem who congregated and took instruction at Charles Alston’s studio at 306 West 141^st Street. At the time, she commented on how the art created by Black artists was perceived: “A few of the artists are producing what is called modern art by some, Negro art by others, and still another group will name the same paintings as primitive art. I imagine that one often wonders where one style end and the other begins, and more often questions whether or not any such thing as modern art or Negro art or primitive art really exists.”

Day was recruited by Charles Alston to paint a mural in the pediatric unit at Harlem Hospital which she worked on in 1936 and 1937. Unfortunately these murals do not survive although photographs of them document their soothing yet playful spirit which was Day’s intent as revealed in her Art Commission statement. Her photograph at work on the mural appears on the introductory panel of this exhibit.

In the years that followed, Selma Day used her skills to make a living as a commercial artist working in advertising, and then very successfully as an interior decorator for department stores and then independently. She died in New Jersey in 1994.

Creits: Historical photos and statement, Collection of the Public Design Commission of the City of New York; special thanks to Amy Torbert, Beth Rubin, Graham Boettcher, and Rick Luftglass for providing information about Day.

Selma Day — In The Artist’s Words

The nature of the children’s illness, that of severe fever and physical disabilities, definitely influenced the composition, color and value of the mural. These children, contrary to most instances require peace and quiet. Therefore, controlled action and lack of brilliance was a point raised. And a quiet composition in soft, restful colors and values seemed more adequate. These sentiments were confirmed by many doctors and nurses who agreed that the constant and prolonged effect upon the patients confined, was far more important than a momentary appreciation of a very gaily and brightly decorated ward, more appropriate for convalescent children, or those of a less serious illness and visitors.

It has been said that the ward has a pleasant and peaceful air, so necessary for the health improvement of these patients.

It was our aim that the designs, above all else, stay flat against the wall, so that at no time would the children have the feeling of spots and forms jumping out at them.

We found the kindly cooperation of the Superintendent, the suggestions of doctors, nurses and children and the admiration of the visitors so helpful, that we tried to inculcate these things into the mural, being of course, ever mindful of the judgment and direction of our supervisors – hoping to please, as near as possible, all concerned.

If the job may be considered a success, much of that success may be attributed to the unselfish cooperation and artistic ability of my assistants, Ronald Joseph and Gwendolyn Knight. For in the addition to the painting, as the wooden frames, stretched canvases, painted the backgrounds before we could proceed with the regular work required in the painting and execution of the designs.

I sincerely hope that we have contributed to the happiness and health of these tiny tots that come and go and that we have helped to foster and maintain good will for the Federal Art Project, to which we are greatly indebted for the grand opportunity and which, I greatly hope, we have well represented.

Elba Lightfoot

Elba Lightfoot (1910-1989). “Toyland in Paradise,” Murals for Children’s Surgical Ward, Harlem Hospital. No longer extant. Statement of March 8, 1938.

Born in Evanston, Illinois, Lightfoot came to New York in 1931 to take an art course at the Grand Central School of Art (fd.1922), a popular school with several hundred students taught by practicing artists. By 1935 she was active in the Harlem art community and became a founder of the Harlem Artists Guild along with well established artists like sculptor Augusta Savage and other young painters like Charles Alston. With Alston and four other African-American painters, she was asked to propose a mural topic for the Harlem Hospital. She applied to paint “Toy Parade” for a pediatric ward and this was approved by the Art Commission and finished in 1938. She continued to paint and her work was featured in several major exhibitions of African-American artists, including “Exhibition of American Negro Art of the American Negro (1851-1940)” at the American Negro Exposition in Chicago in 1940.  Two years later in New York, she was included in an important show at the Downtown Gallery in Greenwich Village “American Negro Art, 19^th and 20^th Centuries,” the first time a commercial gallery had sponsored a show by African-American artists. One of the sponsors was Eleanor Roosevelt who liked to visit the Gallery when she was in New York. The Gallery donated its sales commissions from the show to the Negro Art Fund and continued to promote the work of Black artists like Jacob Lawrence. Little is known about her life after the 1940s.

Credits: Historic photos of mural details and statement courtesy of the Collection of the Public Design Commission of the City of New York.

Elba Lightfoot — In The Artist’s Words

I have attempted to portray my story with the utmost simplicity, because I believe that in this way children are prone to absorb an artist’s attitude of approach as well as the ultimate effect.

In the composition of my subject matter I consulted many children between the ages of two and twelve, whose suggestions I found invaluable. I discovered too, that because of the variety of ages, there likewise, was a variety of preferences, this I feel I have indicated in my final division to create a “Toy Parade.” Everybody loves a parade, and into my own little parade, I have poured the imagination of my own childlike dreams as well as illustrations of some internationally known children’s dates.

To a child awake, these gaily adorned characters in this miniature procession, have the appearance of tiny performers scamping along the tops of the beds most amusingly to children well on their way to the land of nod, these jolly little make-believes are only the toys that we all have loved, ridiculously come to life.

I really feel that in telling my tale to these little folk of the Children’s Surgical Ward in Harlem Hospital, I have not failed their childish expectations. I truly appreciate their marvelous suggestions that proved to be of such decorative value to my mural, to them goes much of the credit that I have received, or dare to expect.

Sara Murrell

Sara Murrell (1915-1987). Born in New York City, she may have first attended art classes at the Harlem YWCA, and also briefly enrolled at Hunter College. Her talents as an artist expanded under the tutelage of painter Charles Alston and Henry Bannern, a painter and sculptor, at the informal studio school they ran at 306 West 141^st Street in Harlem. Selected by Alston, she was one of six African-American artists who submitted proposals for murals at Harlem Hospital and one of the four whose murals were rejected for  depicting too much African-American life.  Almost immediately, Alston recommended her for a project in the Children’s Ward at Cumberland Hospital in Brooklyn, a design that was approved by the Art Commission; the medium was oil on canvas for a substantial 475 sq feet. The theme was “Jungle Folks [aka “Jungle Tales],” and existing black & white photos show lush scenes of African animals and plants whose color scheme can only be imagined as her work overall was described by Claude McKay as “decorative and full of tropical color and exuberance.”  Perhaps her designs for Cumberland were quickly accepted because they had only African animals and not dark-skinned people.

Considered one of the most talented young artists during the 1930s, which included a stint teaching in WPA art programs in North Carolina at African-American schools where she was frightened by the extreme, everyday manifestations of segregation and didn’t stay long, her potential remained unfulfilled.  Her life moved away from art as she tried to make a living, as she wrote in a 1972 letter, “WPA ended, somehow drifted through humanity – housework, factory work, a laundry worker – then there was a war, there was Bulova Watch Company, an aircraft plant in some State, a plumber’s assistant in a shipyard – finally became patriotic and was accepted as an overseas worker for the Red Cross [in the Philippines and Japan].”  Unlike her Harlem contemporary Georgette Seabrooke, Murrell was unable to continue as an artist after the Federal Art Project ended. Numerous other women artists found themselves in the same situation, stymied by their gender, and for women like Murrell, by racism too. They all deserve to be brought back into the history of American art.

Credits: Many thanks to Rick Luftglass for unearthing important information about Sara Murrell. Photo from Literary Digest, August 1,1936.

Health Facilities and WPA Murals

Of the 20 main hospitals, 18 had WPA murals. There are no Art Commission records for mural projects at two Brooklyn hospitals: Coney Island Hospital and Kingston Avenue Hospital.

Bronx: Lincoln Hospital, Fordham Hospital, Morrisania Hospital, Riverside Hospital (on North Brother Island).

Brooklyn: Kings County Hospital, Greenpoint Hospital, Cumberland Hospital (preliminary application approved).

Manhattan: Gouverneur Hospital, Harlem Hospital, Willard Parker Hospital, Bellevue Hospital.

Manhattan (Welfare Island): Hospital for Chronic Diseases (later Goldwater Memorial Hospital), City Hospital (previously Charity Hospital), City Home, Metropolitan Hospital.

Queens: Queens Hospital, Neponsit Beach Children’s Hospital.

Staten Island: Seaview Farm Colony.

Credits: Many thanks to Rick Luftglass for preparing this list.