Evander Childs High School library,
year unknown, looks like 1960s, showing about 2/3 of the Depression-era
mural
Evolution of Western Civilization by James Michael Newell,
who 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.
Image: Public
Art for Public Schools, NYC Department of Education, schools.nyc.gov.
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).