In a Reversal, The San Francisco School Board Has Voted to Cover, Not Destroy, a Series of Controversial High School Murals

The San Francisco Board of
Education has decided to cover up a series of controversial murals
at George Washington High School, reversing an earlier decision to
destroy the works. 

The board met last night to
reconsider the issue following an international outcry over the
fate of the murals, a series of 13 frescoes depicting George
Washington’s violence against slaves and Native Americans.
Thousands of formal complaints and an outpouring of debate across
social media platforms followed the committee’s previous decision
in late June, when they voted unanimously to paint over the
artworks.  

Stevon Cook, the school board
president, announced a new proposal
Friday that called for the murals to be boarded over with
panels rather than removed or destroyed. “Where we all agree is
that the mural depicts the racist history of America, especially in
regards to African-Americans and Native Americans,” said Mr. Cook
in a statement at the time.

After heated debate, a 4-to-3
board vote ensured that the murals would be covered up with
paneling, keeping them intact while hiding them from the eyes of
high schoolers.  

The frescoes, titled The Life
of Washington, were painted by Russian-born artist Victor
Arnautoff in the 1930s as part of FDR’s Works Progress
Administration initiative. Arnautoff, who identified as a
communist, created more than a dozen public murals throughout the
Bay Area at this time. None are more famous—or infamous—than those
painted at the San Francisco high school, which had previously been
the subject of debate in the 1960s and ’70s. 

Those in favor of destroying the
artworks argue that children shouldn’t be subjected daily to the
violent scenes the works illustrate, including one in which white
pioneers step over the slain body of a Native American, and another
showing African American slaves working on Washington’s Mount
Vernon estate. Others stress that Arnautoff’s intent in the murals
was subversive, given that the connections of the Founding Fathers
to slavery and Native American genocide were obscured by mainstream
historians of the day, and that destroying them amounts to
whitewashing both actual history and the history of leftist
responses to racism.   

In a letter written in response to a New York
Times op-ed about the proposed destruction by Bari
Weiss (and published in full on
artnet last month), Cook and
fellow board member Mark Sanchez acknowledged that a majority of
the emails they had received on the issue in recent months were
against destroying the mural. However, they argued that “those in
favor of keeping the mural are predominantly of European descent,
and those protesting the mural are overwhelmingly people of color…
Ultimately, our school board came down on the side of communities
that we all know have had their priorities ignored when it comes to
just about anything, historically or presently, and certainly not
regarding how they are depicted in centuries past public works of
art.”

At last night’s meeting, Sanchez
doubled down on the sentiment: “This country began by justifying
white supremacy through the dehumanizing of people of color,” he
said, according to the New York Times. “This is an example of
that.”

“I don’t get why people are
standing up for this,” said another board member, Faauuga Moliga,
in a speech explicating his vote. “There are black and brown boys
who are dying.” Moliga, however, voted for the
compromise.

However, a groundswell of support
had opposed the destruction of the murals. A ballot measure to
preserve the murals had been gaining traction. Last
week, the San Francisco
Examiner reported that two candidates had entered the race
against current San Francisco school board member Jenny Lam,
who had voted to destroy the murals and whose seat is up for
election in November. Both prospective challengers, Robert
“Bobby” Coleman and Kirsten Strobel, said they were motivated
to run because of the mural controversy.

“I have deep progressive roots across the spectrum of San
Francisco life and I can think of better ways to spend $600,000,”
Coleman, an artist and tenants rights advocate, told the
Examiner.

Other high-profile figures who objected to the destruction
included Dewey
Crumpler, an artist and teacher who painted a “response mural”
to Arnautoff’s mural at George Washington High School after a
previous controversy in the 1960s, and leaders of the local
chapter of the NAACP.

Actor Danny Glover, who attended George Washington High School
in the 1960s, had also been outspoken his belief that the murals
should remain on view.

“I view Arnautoff’s murals as
they were for me: a reminder of the horrors of human bondage and
the mistreatment of native peoples, even by the father of our
country,” Glover said in a
statement to Bay Area
news outlet KPIX. “To destroy them or block them from view would be
akin to book burning. We would be missing the opportunity for
enhanced historic introspection this moment has provided
us.”

The post In a Reversal, The San Francisco School Board Has
Voted to Cover, Not Destroy, a Series of Controversial High School
Murals appeared first on artnet News.