A high school in San Francisco has decided to destroy an 83-year-old Depression-era mural of George Washington because of its depictions of racial minorities.
This is odd, for the black laborers and Native Americans depicted in the artwork aren’t shown as blithe companions of their white oppressors. The mural’s 13 panels include images of slaves in cotton fields and a dead Native American man lying face down on the ground at the pioneers’ feet. These make it quite clear that Washington and his peers were far from perfect. Nevertheless, despite this unvarnished realism, the city’s board of education voted unanimously to paint over the mural anyway.
“It’s always an issue when anyone wants to remove or cover or displace art,” Board Vice President Mark Sanchez said, the Washington Post reported, “But there are countervailing issues we had to look at as well. We believe students shouldn’t be exposed to violent imagery — that it’s degrading.”
The Works Progress Administration mural was painted in 1936 by Victor Arnautoff, an artist with communist sympathies. KQED Arts reporter Sam Lefebvre writes that “according to Arnautoff’s biographer Robert Cherny, the artist intended the mural as a ‘counter narrative,’ or a corrective rebuke to the nation’s founding mythology.” But such subtleties are lost on the late-stage social justice movement.
The itch to destroy art appears confined entirely to adults at the school. George Washington High School students, apparently untraumatized by depictions of degrading violence, nearly all support the mural. When an English teacher asked freshmen to write about it, only four out of 49 thought it should be removed. According to the New York Times, at least one student understood Arnautoff’s intention, writing, “The fresco shows us exactly how brutal colonization and genocide really were and are. The fresco is a warning and reminder of the fallibility of our hallowed leaders.”
The blinkered iconoclasts say American art habitually fails to to depict black and Native American heritage in a clear-eyed manner, but they can’t see that the 1,600 foot mural does exactly that.
It will cost $600,000 to wreck the mural, which Sanchez said was small change in pursuit of “reparations.” Lope Yap Jr., vice president of the schools alumni association told the Post that anti-mural activists accuse opponents of white supremacy.
He told KQED Arts that the alumni association will sue if necessary. A meeting of minds seems unlikely. “Anything less than whitewashing, for the opposition, would be a compromise,” he said.
