Not a New Deal Construction[1] but read on...
Evander Childs High
School on Gun Hill Road and Barnes Avenue in the Bronx. Like
DeWitt Clinton High School
(just a mile and half to the west) and every other monumental Bronx school,
it has a distinguished history but has been chopped up into mini-"excellence
academies" by billionaires and hedge-fund managers, and like Clinton it has
New Deal murals inside:
The History of Western Civilization by
James Michael Newell. Somewhat similar in conception and execution to
Alfred Floegel's
History of the World at
DeWitt Clinton High School; a bit larger (in term of square feet) and
definitely more provocative. As to its New Deal pedigree, Newell himself
inscribed it “In the years 1937 and 1938 these murals were designed
and executed by James Michael Newell...under the Federal Art Project
sponsored by the United States government.”[4] The Federal Art
Project was a division of the Works Progress Administration.
References:
- Evander
Childs Educational Complex, nycago.org, the American Guild of Organists
NY Chapter website (in addition its murals, the school also has an enormous
pipe organ).
- Evander
Childs HS, Lehman Art Gallery.
- Public
Art for Public Schools, NYC Department of Education, schools.nyc.gov.
- Cohen, Michelle, Program Director, Public Art for Public schools, Controversy in Context: A
Reassessment of James Michael Newell's Evolution of Western
Civilization, New Deal Network, Conservation in Context: The Evander
Childs High School Murals Project. A lengthy essay on the mural and a
controversy that arose in 1968 regarding the potrayal of Black people
picking cotton. There is, by the way, a mural in the
Bronx General Post Office that shows the same thing.
- New
Deal, Public
Art for Public Schools, NYC Department of Education, schools.nyc.gov.
- James
Michael Newell, Wikipedia.
- Other
works by James Michael Newell, Smithsonian Institution.
- Works
Progress Administration Federal Art Project, “We Work Again”
(video, 2009).