Do not paint down historic WPA mural at George Washington High School. This is not 1930s Germany or 1917 Russia. This is censorship. Golda Meir once said, “One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.” In a toxic move to be politically correct, it seems we’re doing just that. Erasing inconvenient truths in order to feel good.
In an alarming trend to be "politically correct", school boards are whitewashing the past. Last month a Marin Co. school board expunged the name of historic Dixie School, though its founders did not support the Confederacy during the Civil War.
The latest attempt to change California's past is to remove an historic WPA mural at George Washington High School in San Francisco—for depicting an historic truth. What's next? Grace Cathedral and Coit Tower WPA murals?
And the censorship continues an alarming trend. Why destroy the historic mural? Why not put panels over it? 600k to paint it over? really?
SFUSD thinks it will cost more than that—and they don't care. I guess house painters are very expensive these days. More expensive than hiring a fantastic muralista, say, Juana Alicia, to paint an alternative mural that would create a dialogue with Dewey Crumpler's rebuttal mural, on whiteboard, to protect Victor Arnautoff's original WPA-era mural.
SFUSD thinks it will cost more than that—and they don't care. I guess house painters are very expensive these days. More expensive than hiring a fantastic muralista, say, Juana Alicia, to paint an alternative mural that would create a dialogue with Dewey Crumpler's rebuttal mural, on whiteboard, to protect Victor Arnautoff's original WPA-era mural.
The problem is that we are artistically illiterate, unable to understand allegory, or symbolism. The role of art is to instruct, to teach, not lull us into complacency. We take everything at face value. We don't want to actually think, or have to decode the message embedded within the art. That's why the inane decorative plastic arts that plague us everywhere, is mistaken for art. Students can't see that the mural is highly critical of our sappy rendition of our history, and of George Washington, who, apparently owned slaves. I didn't know that, did you?
Zana Darrow brilliantly noted that the monochromatically painted frontiersmen were depicted as soulless. And they were ruthless—especially the Mountain Men, Kit Carson and John C. Frémont—who mercilessly killed natives as they journeyed to California. That depiction is correct. So we want to hide this ugly chapter of history?
"The artwork on the walls of George Washington High School in San Francisco painted by a WPA artist Victor Arnautoff, exposed the hypocrisy of American History and that is not being seen or understood by those trying to remove and paint over the past.
“The murals represent social history. They provide an inclusive and truthful history… Removing them represents censorship as well as a reactionary moment in time,” an unidentified commenter said. “What I do recommend is that the school board establishes a multimedia display... that indicates the complexity and contradictions of George Washington [and] the extraordinary history of Victor Arnautoff.”
The mural depicts a historic, if harsh truth, Anglos treated the natives and Latinos badly. we should whitewash that out of history? —Change.org
Of course art is political. And people no longer know how to read art or understand the juxtaposition of symbolism. They’re artistically illiterate and don’t want to take the time to actually see what’s going on. They don’t want to actually have to think. They say, oh, it’s pretty, it’s decorative, I like it. Oh, it’s negative, I hate it. A fallout of our consumerist society where we call the decorative arts art, and I don’t mean art for art’s sake.
