Chicago Schools Boast the Largest Collection of Early 20th-Century Murals in the US. So Why Are Activists Encouraging Their Removal?

Chicago Public Schools boast the country’s largest public
collection of early 20th-century murals, but not everyone is happy
about it. That’s because those works, created between 1904 and
1943, haven’t always aged well.

The bulk of the murals were commissioned by the Work Projects
Administration as part of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New
Deal. But while the murals preserve an important moment in American
history, they also preserve some antiquated attitudes about race
and ethnicity.

At issue are the ways that some of the works depict people of
color, particularly Native Americans. In some cases they rely on
stereotypes and avoid the violent realities of colonization, which
forced indigenous peoples off their land and exposed them to
devastating diseases that decimated their peoples, reports the
Chicago
Tribune.

The public was quick to weigh in after the Chicago Board of
Education proposed a new policy
regarding the acquisition, ownership, and conservation of the
schools’ artworks. One comment suggested that
the art depicting Native Americans could “be moved to a warehouse,
and even exhibited at a later time about RACISM in art, and the
‘Master Narrative’/’Manifest Destiny’ myths of the past about
Europeans colonizing this land.”

Many comments called specifically for the removal of artworks
decorating the Chicago Public Schools office building in Garfield
Park, which features a mural of Native Americans steering canoes,
one of which carries a white man. (Potentially adding insult to
injury, the murals are located in the same building as the school
system’s American Indian Education Program.)

The official board policy is to keep WPA works on view in their
original location “to the extent prudent and practicable,” but
notes that works can be relocated and even sold or gifted, provided
the piece will be publicly displayed, with prior approval. (This
does not substantially differ from the policy as last approved in the year
2000.)

A number of the schools’ historic murals have already been
removed over concerns about their content. One of the murals at the
education offices that has been singled out for being problematic
is a 1913 Christopher Columbus painting that was once on display
above the auditorium doors at Trumbull Elementary in
Andersonville.

Last year at Percy Julian Middle School in Oak Park last year,
students from the Social Justice Club convinced administrators to
remove Ethel Spears’s 1937 mural Child and Sports –
Winter because the painting included only white children.
The image didn’t reflect the student body’s diversity and the club
feared it might make new students feel like they didn’t belong,
according to NPR.

The decision to take down the work had something of a ripple
effect. The neighboring Gwendolyn Brooks Middle School
followed quickly suit and removed Spears’s companion
piece, Child and Sports – Summer. And nearby Horace
Mann Elementary moved to put wood paneling on top of Emmanuel
Jacobson and Ralf Henricksen’s Community Life of Oak Park
in the 19th Century, which shows white settlers spending the
winter in cozy cabins while Native Americans shiver outside.

Chicago schools aren’t the only ones dealing with this thorny
issue. A drawn out debate about a 13-panel Depression-era mural
depicting scenes from the life of George Washington, including his
slave ownership, saw the San Francisco Board of Education decide to
cover up the artwork.
(An earlier decision to paint over the works
was loudly decried.)

The new policy was approved on Wednesday at a board meeting that
also voted to end the school system’s recognition of Columbus Day,
observing the October holiday only as Indigenous Peoples Day
instead, rather than using both names for the date in its
calendar.

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Early 20th-Century Murals in the US. So Why Are Activists
Encouraging Their Removal? appeared first on artnet
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