Unconventions: Attempting the Art of Craft and the Craft of Art

The History of Corn

When I give craft lectures like this one, I like to produce handouts. In this case, they were reproductions of the post office murals I describe. The lecture was first delivered at Warren Wilson. Above฀the฀postmaster’s฀door, you see a picture of one kernel of corn. It hangs there as large as a side of beef and painted in those tequila sunrise hues, yellow blending to orange shading to a reddish brown, that are also the stripes of candy corn. At the same time, you can see into the seed through a heart-shaped cutaway, into the germ coiled there heart-shaped as well, white and shiny, the actual size of a small animal brain. Foiling the kernel, adding to the rounded relief of the swelling, the fertile grain, is a thicket of cornstalks sewn so close together the leaves and silk and ears weave into a knobby burlap background. The tops of the stalks you can only imagine, tasseling way above where the canvas has run out through the ceiling, up into the congressional office upstairs, while the roots root the way corn does, a lace of flying buttresses tenting out from the telescoping stalks and into the rich mahogany crust of earth that turns into the mahogany trim of the postmaster’s door and the flanking frames of bulletin boards tacked with wanted posters and blowups of newly issued stamps. The mural is called The History of Corn, and it was painted in 1938 by Lowell Houser as part of the Treasury Department’s The฀History฀of฀Corn 98 Section of Fine Arts. The post office is on Kellogg Street, yes that Kellogg, in Ames, Iowa. And as I used to stand in line at the window , staring up at the mural, I could feel the vibrations through the ground of the mile-long grain trains, covered hoppers painted the colors of after-dinner mints, dragging through a crossing two blocks away. An atmosphere of corn. The composition of the mural is symmetrical. There are two similar images on either side of the giant kernel. On the left side, in hieroglyphic profile, is a shirtless Aztec farmer, angled at the waist, scratching at a hill of corn with a flint-tipped digging stick. On the other side an Iowa farmer is grubbing at the base of a plant looking for cutworm. His posture too is Egyptian, though he is dressed in blue bib overalls and a crushed engineer’s hat. They both are bowing toward the painting’s center while over their shoulders, in the upper corners, their respective suns shine down, one with a pre-Columbian visage, the other rendered more realistically but still tattooed with a scientific swatch of the visible spectrum . In the lower corners, the theme continues. A squat, carved god is balanced by the crouched black-enameled microscope. The skyline of stepped pyramids and balconied temples reflects the setbacks of the skyscrapers and the grain elevator bandoleer. There, a string of feathers and semiprecious stones coils at the farmer’s feet, and there, a ticker tape snakes through the grass, a cousin plant that the corn evolved from. On that tape, in the code of numbers and letters, you can read LH 38, the artist’s signature. What better place for writers to consider stories than in the lobbies of the post offices, the launching pads for their manila-clad space shuttles whose three-month missions are to explore strange new worlds then return to them on the desert landing strips of their desks. The calculus of delivery times, the sixth sense of sensing , yes, this is less than twelve ounces, priority rate. The naive simple trust in this country of the tongue not only to create the language but also to lick the stamp to get it there. Chances are you know of one of these murals. Between 1934 and 1943 the Fine Arts Section of the Treasury Department commisThe ฀History฀of฀Corn฀ 99 sioned more than 1,100 post office murals; 1,000 still exist. Or at least you have a sense of their style if you know the Revolutionary Muralists of Mexico, Rivera or Orozco, from which much of the post office work derived, or the regionalist school of Curry, Benton, and Wood, or any of the painting and poster art thrown into the social realist category...