Changing: Murals & News from DC

There are a couple of interesting bits of news coming from DC regarding murals — one that has been privately owned and others that we may see everyday.

The first is what I read in the Washington Post that made me excited. I’ve always wanted to see the “hidden” mosaic tile mural by Chagall in Georgetown but it was located in the private garden owned by Evelyn Nef. She was a patron of the arts and the mural was given to her and her husband by their friend, Marc Chagall. She was a widow when she died at 96 and without children. The National Gallery of Art, has fortuitously become the recipient of her generous donation — a treasure trove of illustrations, by Renoir, Kadinsky and Léger, as well as prints by Pablo Picasso and Chagall along with his mosaic mural, Orphée. A crew has carefully moved the mosaic panels to the NGA’s outdoor public Sculpture Garden for all to enjoy. It only took 3.5 years to do! (Read more here about the fascinating, laborious and tedious measures taken to move and restore the mural in the process. Makes me even think more highly of the National Gallery).

Other news out of DC that affects many US Postal mural depicting Native American Indians: The Smithsonian has shed some light that the artists who painted about 400 murals in US Postal Offices during the New Deal era to help create jobs, did not necessarily know much about the American Indian Culture. The Smithsonian Postal Museum now has an online exhibit called Indians at the Post Office: Native American Themes in New Deal-Era Murals. The emphasis is to research these murals to determine their accuracy.

From the online preface statement:

While some mural images succeeded in capturing the importance of Native peoples in the American historic tableau as a result of an increased national consciousness, others were based on rumor, legend, and stereotype resulting in dramatic and sometimes bizarre inaccuracy. These murals in post offices across the United States are telling and re-telling an American Indian story to the general public every day…

..The long-range goal of this project titled Indians at the Post Office: Native Themes in New Deal-Era Murals, is to critique, from a contemporary vantage point, all 400 of these murals. The purpose is to address both the virtues and the inaccuracies in these historic depictions, and to launch and continue to populate a web-based virtual exhibition on the Smithsonian National Postal Museum website.  We begin this launch with 27 of these murals and look ahead to a further project collaboration with the documentation of the other 370, to be periodically premiered on the NPM website…