Dr.
Sylvia Rhor is Associate Professor of Art History at Carlow
University. Dr. Rhor received an M.A. and Ph.D. in the History of Art
from the University of Pittsburgh and a B.A. in Art History from New
York University, where she was a Martin Luther King, Jr. Scholar. Her
doctoral thesis focused on the recently restored murals in Chicago's
public schools; Dr. Rhor's thesis marks the first sustained scholarly
analysis of that collection. She became involved with this
collection while directing "Chicago: A City in Art" at The
Art Institute of Chicago. In that capacity, Dr. Rhor was part of a
large-scale effort to locate, preserve, document and re-integrate
historic murals into contemporary school life. After leaving the Art
Institute, she was hired by Chicago Public Schools as a consultant
for the mural collection. She also contributed research and an essay
to Heather Becker's Art
for the People
and served on the curatorial team for To
Inspire and to Instruct: The Art Collection of Chicago Public
Schools,
an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. She is currently
preparing her doctoral thesis for publication. Dr. Rhor will be
drawing on her work on the historic murals in Chicago public schools
in her upcoming lecture at the Decorated School Research Network
conference in February 2013. An overview of her lecture is provided
here.
Outstanding
American Women:
Sylvia
Rhor, PhD
In
1941, the Chicago Board of Education declared that Edward Millman’s
(1907-1964) fresco Outstanding
American Woman in Lucy
Flower Technical High School was unacceptable.2
Millman’s fresco cycle, which
spanned six walls in the school’s entrance foyer, depicted a series
of well-known American women such as Susan B. Anthony, Harriet
Beecher Stowe, and Clara Barton. Though the Board praised the
artist's choice of women, they stated that the mural was “lacking
in the spirit we wish to have in a public school to inspire young
American womanhood and that anyone looking at the mural would get the
impression [the murals] are stressing poverty and the failure of our
democracy to uplift its people.”3
Under directives from the Board of Education, the fresco was covered
with white calcimine in November 1941. It remained obscured from the
public until 1995, when conservators from the Chicago Conservation
Center uncovered the fresco, then hidden under layers of paint and
school paraphernalia.
The censoring of Millman's fresco
at Flower High School raises a number of questions regarding the role
of mural painting in early 20th
century public education in Chicago. Commissioned by the Works
Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project (WPA-FAP), one of the
New Deal relief programs for artists, it was one of hundreds of mural
placed in public buildings during the Great Depression. In keeping
with WPA-FAP policy, the theme – women’s contribution to American
civilization – had been chosen in collaboration with project
supervisors and the school principal. For an all-girls’ school like
Flower, the subject seemed particularly suitable. In fact, it was
well received by the school’s students, who declared his portrayal
“heroic” in the school yearbook of 1940.
Before embarking on this project,
too, Millman had not only completed several successful New Deal mural
commissions in Chicago and throughout the United States, but had also
served as arbiter in several high profile censorship cases. As such,
he was intimately familiar with the parameters of acceptable imagery
and subject matter for school murals. Nevertheless, the fresco
proved unviable by Board standards.
Given that the teachers, students
and FAP supervisors firmly supported the mural, what was it then that
made this fresco untenable? How did Millman’s work contradict the
notions of “democracy,” “womanhood” and “uplift” evoked
in the Board’s criticism? Millman’s affiliation with left-wing
politics of the 1930s makes it tempting to view his mural within the
context of New Deal murals and place it among other similarly
controversial works of the period. However, this reading neglects
the fresco’s place within a long tradition of mural painting in
Chicago public schools.
Between 1905 and 1943, over 2000
mural panels (approximately 500 cycles) were executed for city
schools. These monumental panels lined corridors, auditoriums and
libraries of city schools and included examples from some of
Chicago’s best-known artists.
As
I demonstrated in my thesis, the school mural movement emerged under
the auspices of activist clubwomen in Chicago in the opening decades
of the 20th
century. It was precisely through the commissioning and placement of
murals in public schools that middle-class women successfully
intervened in educational politics in the years before suffrage. The
groundwork laid by such groups informed mural painting in schools
until the end of the New Deal, when Millman’s mural was censored. A
sustained analysis of the censorship of Millman's fresco at Flower
within the context of the long tradition of the school mural movement
in Chicago reveals that murals were pivotal tools for intervening in
educational politics and articulating varying notions of democracy in
the early twentieth century. In fact, I argue, that Millman's
depiction of women such as Jane Addams, Lucy Flower, and Grace
Abbott, Millman simultaneously evoked the very network of female
reform that had given rise to the school mural movement in Chicago,
and critiqued the biases of public education in Chicago in the 1940s.
Moreover, the restoration and reintegration of Millman's fresco and
other historic murals into Chicago's public schools at the opening of
the 21st
century brings attention to the contemporary role of art in public
education. The rediscovery and use of the historic mural collection
demonstrates the critical role that conservators, museum
professionals and citizens groups play in preserving the arts in
public schools at a moment when these very disciplines are being
radically cut from the curriculum.
1
This text is drawn in part from my doctoral thesis, Educating
America: Murals and Public Education in Chicago, 1905-1941
(Ph.D. diss., University of Pittsburgh, 2004).
2
Lucy Flower Technical High School was re-named Lucy Flower
Vocational High School in 1956 and re-named once in 1995 as Lucy
Flower Career Academy. The school became co-educational in the
1970s. The school was closed in 2003.
3
Marcia Winn, “’Dismal!’ So High School Murals are Painted
Out,” Chicago Tribune,
December 5, 1941.
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