A Common Canvas: Pennsylvania's New Deal Post Office Murals (review)

A traveling version of the exhibit will appear in Mercyhurst College, Erie, Pennsylvania in February 2010, and other venues around the state.

Sites interested in hosting the exhibit may also contact Curt Miner at the State Museum at wminer@state.pa.us.

Internet: The State Museum produced an interactive Google map identifying the location of the eighty-eight extant Section of Fine Arts murals in Pennsylvania. The site also includes eight brief YouTube videos featuring portions of a gallery talk by curator Curt Miner. It can be located at: http://www.statemuseumpa.org/common-canvas.html. A gallery interview conducted with the exhibit's curators can be found on the PA Bookstore's website http://www.pabookstore.com/spimedpococa.html.

As part of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania's commemoration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, the State Museum of Pennsylvania mounted a temporary exhibit, A Common Canvas:Pennsylvania's New Deal Post Office Murals, which ran from November 22, 2008 to May 17, 2009. The exhibit was also designed to function as a traveling exhibit when its run at the State Museum ended. Curated by Senior Curator of History Curtis Miner and independent scholar David Lembeck, and featuring the photographs of Michael Mutmansky, this show examined a collection of federally sponsored murals that had previously only been available to those who glimpsed them on display in the eighty-eight post offices and federal buildings where they hang. By gathering and contextualizing this collection of hidden treasures, the State Museum of Pennsylvania provided a fascinating window into the New Deal's impact on Pennsylvania. The artworks and the extensive research undertaken by the curators revealed the distinctive character of the state's local communities in the 1930s, and showcased a rich artistic legacy of the Depression era.

A Common Canvas features one of the lesser-known New Deal programs, the United States Treasury Department's Section of Fine Arts (commonly called the Section), a national public art initiative that committed one percent of all federal construction appropriations to the production of murals to enhance government buildings. Unlike the arts programs of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the Treasury Department's primary objective was to commission great works of art, not to employ struggling artists. Unlike the freedom enjoyed by many WPA artists, the Section required its artists to create uplifting, civic-minded works produced in the "Midwestern Regionalist" or "American Scene" style popularized by Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton. The artists developed their artworks in collaboration with local officials (often a community's postmaster) in order to produce works that would satisfy the values and tastes of community residents. Treasury department administrators also scrutinized the artists' works at all stages of production to ensure each met the program's guidelines. The murals thus reflected unique collaborations between artists, New Dealers, and ordinary Pennsylvania citizens.

Between 1934 and 1943, eighty-two artists hired by the Section produced ninety-four murals for federal buildings in Pennsylvania, eighty-eight of which were installed in post offices constructed or remodeled in the 1930s. Fifty-eight of the post office murals were paintings, but artists also utilized a wide range of other materials including mosaic tiles, stone, glass, metal, and wood. Several artists chose media that reflected a community's major industry, such as Josephine Mather's homage to Ford City's glass industry, Glass Making, sandblasted onto Cararra glass, and Barbara Crawford's mural for Bangor, Pennsylvania called Slate Belt People, painted onto four massive sheets of locally-quarried stone.

The curators arranged the exhibit into six sections. Visitor first encountered a full-sized mural from the Selinsgrove post office that introduced the Section of Fine Arts Program, the rationale behind it, and the guidelines and collaborative process in which artists worked. The murals were then arranged thematically into five grouping based on the subject portrayed in the artwork: agriculture, coal and steel, history, town and country...