Bronx New Deal - Photo #762 - Evander Childs High School Murals

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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:

  1. 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).
  2. Evander Childs HS, Lehman Art Gallery.
  3. Public Art for Public Schools, NYC Department of Education, schools.nyc.gov.
  4. 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.
  5. New Deal, Public Art for Public Schools, NYC Department of Education, schools.nyc.gov.
  6. James Michael Newell, Wikipedia.
  7. Other works by James Michael Newell, Smithsonian Institution.
  8. Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project, “We Work Again” (video, 2009).