 So Devin has a big responsibility to wake you up. I'm not pointing out any names, I don't know anything like that. I'm Grace Whister, I am on the program committee of this audit room and I wanted to mention what the program is next week. I think most of you are familiar with Bess O'Brien, who is a filmmaker. She's going to do what we're calling it, telling stories and making movies. She's going to illustrate her talk with Coase from the documentary that she's made and she's going to talk about how telling stories and raising the voices of those who are often on her healthcare dialogue around important issues. How many of you have seen one of Bess's films before? Quite a few. So most of you are aware of her work. So today, we have what I hope is going to be a very interesting talk. There was anything he wanted me to say about him, especially. He said that he was a nice guy and I said, I've only met you one time before this and so I'm really not sure. So after the talk, we can vote. So I had the pleasure of taking a tour with Devon of a very interesting architectural house in Barrie. Remind me again of the name of the architect. Don McKnight. Don McKnight. Does some of you know Don McKnight? Anyhow, it was fascinating to be with Devon because he knew so much and as I said to him, the thing that I liked best about meeting Devon was that he had his teenage son with him and he was really interested and even admitted it. Not to me. Not to all he did. He did to me. So Devon is the State Architectural Historian at the Vermont Division for Historic Preservation. And did you all know that we had a State Architectural Historian? Well, you know everything. We worked in the State House. Well, I used to work for the Department of Libraries and people were amazed that we had a State Librarian but people, I'm a friend of mine would say, you know, every state has a state flower and a state bird and a state librarian. So I guess it sort of, I think I need to stop talking. So Devon has worked there since 2006 here in his Masters in Historic Preservation at UVM and he has a BA in Art History and I will turn this over before I can embarrass myself anymore. All right. Thank you very much. And wow, that's a lot to live up to. So I'll do my best. Do we want to hit the lights for the visuals here? Can you hit the lights? Are they over there? So this is a great, a topic of great interest to me because it blends two topics that I'm very interested in, art history and architecture. And thus the title, Art and Architecture of the New Deal, see what I did there. And it's research that I've been doing over the years, just kind of when I'm in a town checking out what's around and flagging these New Deal projects and really trying to understand what the New Deal was about and more importantly how it impacted Vermont. So the New Deal, if you know anything about it, it's called Alphabet Soup of Federal Programs. The CWA, the ERA, the Treasury Department, the WPA, the PWA, the FAP, it's just ridiculous. And even in going back through historical firsthand sources, even the federal agencies confused the acronyms, which they couldn't sort it out either. So I don't feel too bad if I mess up which branch of which agency did something, but I think I've got it nailed down pretty well. So all of these overlapping programs, and they were set up as specific branches of the federal government, they all had different goals but they worked together so that you might have the Treasury Department building a post office and then working with the Works Progress Administration to commission artwork for that post office. So they overlap a lot. But the three main goals of the New Deal and especially its art and building programs were to first provide employment for out-of-work laborers, builders, contractors, architects, as well as artists. Second was to provide public artwork for public buildings. And third was to bring art to the general public, to get art out of the realm of the museum, which could be intimidating for the average person. And we have to remember that in the 1930s, most people did not own original works of art for display in their house, unless you were wealthy or had access to a larger urban area that had a public museum. Vermont really didn't. The Fleming Art Museum wasn't founded until 1931. Here in Montpelier, though, you had the Wood Gallery. So that was very unique for Montpelier to have that great resource of the GW Wood Gallery. But otherwise, fine art was really limited to what somebody might see on Sunday in a church, maybe a stained glass window or a painting of a saint, virgin and child. And it really wasn't part of the everyday life of the average American. And a lot of these, one of the stated goals of these New Deal art programs was to get the art to the public. Instead of expecting people to go to a museum, put the artwork in the town hall, put the artwork in the post office where people go every day on routine business, the public library, and that way they can't avoid it. It's right there. So that was a big emphasis of this program, was art for the general public. We'll be looking mainly at work done for the Treasury Department. And in the 1930s, the Treasury Department was responsible for the design and construction of all federal buildings in the country. So today it's the General Services Administration, Treasury Department, because they held the purse strings. They doled out the money so they controlled the designs. And the Treasury section of painting and sculpture often just called the section, that was the branch of the Treasury Department that was in charge of the mural decorations for post offices that we'll be looking at today. So, you know, the 1930s was a dramatic time in American history. You've got the Depression, you know, you've got the Jazz Age. This is an example of a painting by Stuart Davis, very important early modernist American painter from 1938. This was a WPA federal art project mural. You know, this is vibrant and jazzy and abstract and colorful. It's actually a scene of Gloucester, Massachusetts, heavily abstracted. But you know, this is a pivotal point in American art history when you have artists like Stuart Davis and Marston Hartley really exploring early modernism and abstraction on one hand and on the other hand you have people who want to look back to, you know, this is the Depression and they want to look back to the good old days and more representative art and works that display a more traditional, kind of nostalgic view of life in America. You know, works like this, Baptism in Kansas by John Stuart Curry, 1938. You know, this is known as regionalism, a heavy emphasis on the Midwest, the bread basket of the country, that stronghold of good virtue and values. And I'm from Minnesota, so I can say that. But this was really, you know, these are the two forces that worked in American art. Stuart Davis, modern, bold, bright and much more traditional. Rural scene, the heavens are opening up, the sunshine, the doves, the classic rural farm. So with the New Deal art projects, they absolutely, for murals that are permanently installed in buildings, in federal buildings, they wanted this. They did not want this. Yes? So swing landscape is a mural. I want to say that this is maybe eight by six feet. It was actually painted for a public housing project. But then never installed. It was sold privately. I don't know why. But this is not this big. This is not a mural. This is an easel painting. But the subject matter, looking back in a lot of kind of the good old days of early America is what the section of fine arts and the federal arts projects really latched onto us. That's what they wanted these artists to portray. They didn't want really wacky modernism. Other examples are Good Earth, also by John Stewart Curry. The notion of the heroic farmer, the individual in the field with his children and the bountiful harvest. And remember, this is the Dust Bowl, Great Depression. So this is an idealized view. The little farmstead off in the background. But that notion of the rugged individual, if you will, really strong, able-bodied, the next generation. This is what the section wanted to promote in the paintings that were produced. And Thomas Hart Benton, probably the most famous, well, there's this trifecta, triumvirate of painters, John Stewart Curry, Thomas Hart Benton, and Grant Wood. Benton really takes almost a surrealist approach to the landscape. But still, it's this harvest. It's the natural wilderness, this bounty trying to show this idealized rural agrarian culture. And Grant Wood. This is a little print, and I love this is the most geometrically perfect planting of corn you will ever see. You know, it's just... So you can see stylistically, you know, you can almost see Grant Wood laying this out with a compass and protractor, you know, versus Thomas Hart Benton with his swoopings, you know, kind of rolling waves of landscape. But they're all getting at that heart of the rural America, the good America. And if this looks familiar to someone, that little cottage in the back, it's a play on Grant Wood's famous American Gothic revival cottage in the back. So these painters were enormously popular in the 1920s, 30s, 40s. Norman Rockwell, that era. So some of the influences on the murals that we'll see certainly come from not only the fine art world with Benton and Curry and Wood, but also from popular illustration, N.C. Wyeth and his lineage, Andrew Wyeth with these illustrating these classic novel Treasure Island and, you know, these great illustrations and books that people were looking at. And other works, Howard Pyle, who was actually N.C. Wyeth's teacher, this is 1897, so quite a bit earlier, but he's showing these kinds of dramatic, you know, Battle of Bunker Hill, you know, pivotal moments in American history, kind of ra-ra-go, you know, very patriotic and large, exciting scenes with action and, you know, cannon and guns and smoke. So this was also influencing what type of work the section, the Treasury Department, was saying would be appropriate for these public murals. And of course, we can't talk about public murals without talking about Diego Rivera, the famous Mexican muralist, who at this 1933, he's commissioned to do a huge mural right in the lobby of Rockefeller Center. This is a plum assignment. And he started work on it, started, and this was a fresco, so he's actually laying the colored plaster onto the wall permanently. And he submitted one proposal that was approved and created something completely different, which didn't go over well with the Rockefellers, partly because it included a portrait of Vladimir Lenin and a not-so-flattering portrait of John D. Rockefeller Jr., where he's drinking and cavorting with women of ill repute. They were paying him to do this. So the Rockefellers actually said, you're done, they destroyed the fresco, ripped it off the wall, it's gone. What you see in the upper right is a recreation that Rivera did in Mexico City. But this was a huge fiasco, public relations nightmare for everyone involved. And the federal government did not want anything like this to happen. So with the section murals, absolutely, they put the kibosh in any sort of political statement. They did not want this to become anything controversial in a community. It still did in some cases, but overall, the artists are smart. And they knew that if they were going to submit a proposal for a mural, they learned pretty quickly what the government wanted. So that's what they would give them. And it became known in the artistic community as painting the section. So an artist might say, well, it's not really what I would want to do, but I'm painting it for the section. So they want a big heroic farmer, they want a wheat field, they want a sun in the sky. I can do that. So the government started getting what they wanted and hope to avoid situations like this. So into the buildings, there are five post offices in Vermont that have these murals. They're often referred to as WPA murals. They're not. And this is where that alphabet soup comes in. These are treasury relief art project murals through the section of fine arts. So at the end of the day, if you call it a New Deal mural, you're safe. But Rutland was the first series of murals done and created to decorate the lobby of the courthouse, post office and courthouse in Rutland. And that was built in 1931. So these murals came a couple years after construction of the building. And the artist was Stephen Belasky. He was a local boy. He grew up, born and raised in Bellows Falls, Vermont. So as we'll see later, a lot of these murals, the painters were coming from out of state because they were national competitions. But this one went to Stephen Belasky and he chose as the subject matter these key moments in Vermont history. And if we look at some of the first ones, it's a beautiful lobby. It's actually being restored right now. So at some point, if you're in Rutland, just pull over and go inside. They're beautiful paintings. This triptych shows early history of Vermont with Ethan Allen, of course. I can't paint Vermont history without a picture of Ethan Allen here. And in the middle, the Green Mountain Boys. And on the right is a painting called the Beach Seal. And this is a Yorker. So he's raising his fist against Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys for claiming what New York thought was their land and the New Hampshire grants overlapped. And the Beach Seal, you can just make out, these figures here are holding tree branches, switches from a tree, from a beach tree. And this was a form of colonial corporal punishment where somebody you don't agree with round him up and give him a few wax and the welts that it would leave, that was the Beach Seal. Literally. And you can tell he's already been through something because, look, his pants, his stocking, his torn pulled down, his pants are torn. So whether the Beach Seal has already been applied or is about to be applied, I'm not quite sure, but so there's a lot of thought that went into these paintings and research and documentation. Another picture, Meryl, in the same lobby, the Green Mountain Boys, and this shows them gathered at the window of the Breckenridge Farm, fighting off the sheriff from Albany who was coming to kick them off the land with the New York grants and they're standing strong and chase them away. And this is a very interesting one, freeing the first slave in the state of Vermont. And this is a depiction of November 28th, 1777, Captain Ebenezer Allen from Bennington reading a certificate of emancipation for Dinah Mattis and her small child who are shown in the center of the picture here. And they were rescued from a British baggage train, basically troops moving through the area, and emancipated. And what's really neat is I think Stephen Blaskey was a pretty cool guy. I've researched him and he's just got character. And you can tell this figure here, sitting with his back to us, has a canteen down here. And if you look at it closely, on the canteen, S-J-B, Stephen J. Blaskey. So he painted himself in. So it's those little details that I looked at this painting many times before I saw that little initials on the canteen. So you can go back and always find something new. And they're great history lessons. And another one in the same space, Benedict Arnold commanding the naval battle on Lake Champlain. And this is really that kind of heroic American Revolution scene. And you can tell that this is heavily influenced by work by people like N. C. Wyeth and Captain John Paul Jones. You know, very similar composition and use of the strong central heroic figure leading the charge with his sword. So this was picking up on a lot of trends that were going on in the art and illustration worlds at the time. So Rotland is the most extensive collection with its, I think, seven individual mural panels. The other post offices tend to have one main large rectangular mural, as you'll see. So White River Junction, Douglas Crockwell did this mural in 37. And all of these murals are painted oil on canvas. And they were done in the artist's studio and then taken to the building and glued to the wall. So they're not frescoes and they're not painted directly to the wall surface. They were done offsite. The post office and the treasury would give the artist the exact dimensions of the space they were to fill, and then the artist would have canvas cut to that size, paint the painting in their studio and then bring it to be installed. So Crockwell also a very interesting individual. Born in Ohio, lived most of his life in Glens Falls and did a few other murals, one in Endicott, New York, one in Mississippi. So you can see how with the growth of this program, artists started in other states that maybe weren't their home state. Crockwell was also an inventor, an experimental filmmaker, really a fascinating person. And all these artists were, these are highly trained, highly skilled artists. These are not just Sunday painters who thought, oh wouldn't it be nice to decorate the post office. These are serious trained artists. So Crockwell, a picture of him painting the mural, and his descendants have a great collection of the letters from the Treasury Department to him, and this one is nice because it lays out he was paid $1,280 to create the mural in three installments. First for your sketch, second for when you're half done with the mural, and then finally the final portion when it's completed installed and approved. So there was a lot of checks and balances. The artists were not just given free reign. They had to submit sketches. Sketches had to be approved. Then they had to lay out their mural, get approval again. They would send people, the Treasury would send people out to check up on progress, make sure nobody was sneaking in, Vladimir Lenin into their pictures. So they were really, really a lot of oversight. And this last paragraph talks about a different project where they say the second subject matter would not, I'm afraid, fit within the scheme of subject matter. So right here you can see they're saying yeah, no, we don't like your idea. Do something else. So a lot of control over what was created in these murals. This is the mural and it's at the end wall of what was the lobby of the post office. This building is now largely used by the Center for Cartoon Studies. They have their library in it and I think you can generally step into this lobby and see the mural without going through too much effort. And Crockwell, very interesting composition. All the other painters basically filled the canvas from edge to edge at the bottom with some sort of scenery. Crockwell developed this kind of dumbbell shaped composition in which this background of sky wraps just around the edges and becomes the river flowing through the middle of the composition. Partly because he had to deal with this darn pediment before, which is tough to integrate into a rectangular form. But a lot of creativity and the subject matter that he was working with. So on the left he's showing traditional Vermont industries. Certainly the stone industries, quarrying, marble here and you can tell he did his research also. This man is splitting off chunks of stone with the plug feather technique with a little diagram here where two iron feathers are placed in a hole that's drilled in the stone and then this wedge is driven between and the force splits the stone apart. Very labor intensive. But he knew he had to depict it properly because people in Vermont know how this is done. And on the right hand side we have a more agricultural scene where they're harvesting maple syrup, harvesting sap from the trees. And this also shows the farmer with a tractor so a little modern technology coming in, plowing the fields and also the tree stumps. They're clearing the forest that's partly for growth at the farm, partly for firewood. But this is showing there's an impact of these people on the landscape so it's not just a pretty postcard view of Vermont landscape it's showing how people really use the landscape in the background, the little farmhouse in the barn and boy, this hill it's straight out of Rutland County it's, I don't know for sure if that's where he was painting but it's right in the mountain range there around Huberton spot on. So that is in the White River Junction Post Office. It does, yep very similar to Benton with these kind of flowing very painterly loose brushwork. So in St. Albans you'll see a trend here these first three Rutland, White River, St. Albans they're all railroad towns that's where the big industry and commerce was in the 1930s. This one was done for the Post Office and Custom House which is built right in Rutland City, right downtown and it actually has two murals at either end of the large lobby. Phillip once his loss on Sultza my favorite name adds another layer of interest because he was an immigrant. His family moved to the US from Sweden when he was six years old trained as an engineer fought in the US military in World War I and was actually held as a POW in Germany. Came back to the US and became an artist and then I imagine it must have been pretty rewarding for him to have been an immigrant fought in the war, been a POW to then be hired by his adoptive country to create works of art. That's pretty cool. His murals the first one we'll look at is called Haying and it's another kind of idealized scene of cutting the hay on a Vermont farm and it shows the manner in which it was done was really not that different from the 19th century horses, hay wagons, pitch works not a lot of technology being shown here and also interestingly there's a couple dancing as people do when gathering hay this raised a few eyebrows in St. Albans and there's some great newspaper accounts of people saying well it's a nice painting but why are they dancing so a little artistic license you've got a boy playing the fiddle why isn't he helping pitch hay but again this really highlights that kind of idealized rural farm life where life is free and good and the barefoot woman in the white dress dancing with the young man and so it's not exactly true to life and the corresponding mural at the opposite end of the lobby is a winter scene so this is sugaring off. You'll see a trend here a lot of maple sugaring that was Vermont in a nutshell and this is another kind of quaint scene that was criticized by the St. Albans spoke because they said we don't gather sap this way anymore that's how our parents used to do it you know we don't use oxen this is the 30s and they complained about these old fashioned cars so really interesting that the intent wasn't necessarily to show present day life there was more a nostalgic view and the people in these communities sometimes kind of felt like doesn't really reflect us but that's you know it's a nice composition it shows the process of gathering the sap from the woods carrying it on a yoke with two buckets and then dumping it into the water bucket and boiling it and then again these kind of playful scenes of kids having a snowball fight a young boy and a girl you know he's wearing a baseball cap is he back from college they're clearly not dressed to work in the woods you know what's this little encounter about so it's kind of just a nice playful scene Northfield this was a surprise because previously we've looked at these you know urban centers for Vermont you know White River, Rutland, St. Albans but then Northfield and Woodstock two smaller communities also have post office murals and this one was done by Charles Doherty whose father was actually a very famous muralist and Charles worked as an artist but didn't really pursue it full time but he did get the commission for the Northfield post office and very hard to find a picture of him this is here he is posing as a model for one of his dad's murals but he did a few pieces during the New Deal era and this is the mural in the post office and it's wonderful I love this one and you can see how he really used the full edge to edge top to bottom incorporating this door frame in the composition and it was great when I took this picture I was in the lobby and this is still an active post office the post office boxes are there and the customer desk and just taking pictures and a person walked in and she said what are you doing I'm doing some research on these murals and she looked up and she said I never saw that before I'm like good lord so pick your head up look up because it's only been there 80 years now so but this got me thinking why a north field post office with a mural of downhill skiers this should be in Stowe turns out in the 30's north field was banking on becoming a ski destination town they had private trains coming up from New Haven, Connecticut every weekend to ski on one ski hill, I think it was on Payne Mountain in north field they had a little rope toe going up that they built in the 1930's and north field was really hoping to become a ski destination, a winter sports destination so this mural tries to depict that and it shows all the current for the time ski technology with these hard leather boots the old bear trap bindings that have a spring that go around your heel and no quick release bindings heavy wooden skis this is when skiing was really an athletic pursuit you had to know what you were doing otherwise you could really hurt yourself there's none of the modern shaped skis and really lightweight quick release equipment that we have today so these skiers in various degrees of skill this guy is racing down the hill you can see the cloud of snow that he's kicked up and this guy is kind of hoping to stay upright this person is falling down here so just a fun light hearted scene but gives a little glimpse into that history of north field that today most people don't think of north field Vermont you think of Norwich University but you don't think of downhill ski Mecca this was I didn't put that on there I think 30 39 yep and then also in another part of the lobby there are these three medallions for lack of a better word they're maybe three feet across in each dimension these are nice little vignettes of again classic Vermont subject matter the the heroic farmer Jolly green giant farmer here the only depiction of a cow in any Vermont murals of this era, note and then the last one is a stone carver north field was also well known for its stone carving industry yes, those are also on canvas and they're mounted with this I think it's just a simple half round wood trim stock that goes around the edges nope, no respirators no goggles just carving away in a shed so in Woodstock the previous murals have been pretty specific there's a picture of skiing or there's a picture of an individual in Woodstock the artist who's the only woman of the group, Bernadine Custer she depicts 140 years of Woodstock history in one mural so she was very ambitious and she was also highly trained and lived both in New York City and in London Dairy and in fact the London Dairy Historical Society is in her former home and they've got a huge collection of her work and all of her papers are at the University of Vermont Special Collections so that's a goldmine of information so there she is photo from UVM and as part of that collection we have the preparatory sketch so this is what she would have prepared and this is small it's maybe 4 inches by 10 inches just a little sketch and this is what she would have submitted to the Treasury Department to say this is what I'm thinking for this mural this is the general composition figures will be, how the space will be used the final piece differs a little bit but it's pretty spot on so that's how it appears today and basically you can read it like a book starting at the left-hand side in the background there's a little log cabin these are the pioneers the frontier days are people on horseback with their oxen and their wagon full of household goods taming the wilderness and then you've got the revolutionary era here with the fight for independence and clearing the lands chopping down a tree and then these three figures in the middle are really the primary focal point and corresponding to buildings in the background that relate to their individual endeavors but do not exist in Woodstock so I thought for sure oh that's the church no it's not totally made up but the individuals here's a close up of the left-hand side where you can see the pioneers and the revolutionaries coming in and then in the middle here I need to look at my notes here to get the names right so the first one is Hosea Baloo and he was a universalist preacher from New Hampshire that's okay he lived in the Woodstock area just for a couple years but while he was there he wrote a treatise on atonement which is apparently a pivotal work in universalism and he was very well regarded and clearly deemed worthy of being in the mural of Woodstock the second person is Jacob Collimer lawyer, politician postmaster general under President Taylor but he did live in Woodstock for about 30 years so he made it into the mural was he a governor also? yep and then the third one for any librarians in the audience appreciate John Cotton Dana library and museum director he was born in Woodstock so he definitely deserves to be there and actually the Dana family home is now the Woodstock History Center phenomenal building and then about this guy on the end he's the common man he's not a specific person he's there to represent just the common resident individual of Woodstock the hard worker the everyday farmer now on the right hand side it gets interesting somehow we have an environment in which you can golf and ski at the same time so we have a gas pump we have a modern automobile people riding horseback people hunting so this is 1930s present day Woodstock when it's a vacation destination tourism this is selling Vermont for outdoor recreations in the summer in the winter technology with gas pumps and the gas pumps were not well received in this fabulous letter this is one of my favorites this is from the postmaster of Woodstock to the assistant chief of the section of fine arts where she says Woodstock Vermont is not mural minded they really didn't want this mural but they were kind of forced into it but I guess she's saying okay I suppose we appreciate it and then in the last paragraph Woodstock does not put its gas pumps up front she wanted the artist to come back and paint out the gas pump because that was not appropriate for Woodstock so the artist declined and the gas pumps are there today but I think it's really interesting but here also we see this town saying we like the old fashion stuff but none of that dirty gas pumps so it's really interesting on how communities responded in St. Albans they complained that the maple sugaring was old fashioned whereas here they're saying oh it's too new so you can't win but this is a great really a great article in local papers about Woodstock doesn't need a post office why is this being forced on us and they got it so yes yes where she's saying a few strokes might do wonders just paint it out just get rid of that gas pump and clean it up you'll be all set so that didn't happen so I said there are five murals and there are but there are supposed to be six there's the unfinished mural unstarted mural actually Island Pond was supposed to have a mural another railroad town way up in northern Vermont Brighton and Bars Miller was awarded the commission and this was part of a national competition by Life Magazine called the 48 States Competition where ran a juried contest to select an artist to do one mural in one post office in every state and the article is fascinating because it's pretty blunt or they say apparently rural Americans are artistic stay-at-homes with a preference for paintings that reproduce experiences and scenes and parts of history with which they are familiar they're saying they don't want modern art they don't want new stuff tried and true and significantly the much publicized main street atmosphere of small towns does not seem to mean so much to the people who actually live in them so that's pretty bold so but this competition selected this is the sketch that Bars Miller did for what he called lumber yard in the description of the piece it talks about how Bars Miller has discarded previously favored allegorical figures for more outright reflection of American life that's what these paintings were about they didn't want mystical allegorical scenes they wanted everyday real life and so here's a picture of a sawmill two workers cutting up a log and this is right in Island Pond well you can partly tell because of the island in the pond in the background but also the train station this is the Grand Trunk railroad station and clearly Miller is showing this building see the peeked gable there the little tower right here so definitely is on the site sketching this creating this this proposal and then there's also the roundhouse and the turntable for the locomotive so this is very site specific interestingly somehow things got confused and Paul Sample another very well known Vermont artist from Norwich Vermont that's a Dartmouth he got a commission for the Westerly Rhode Island post office for this scene and the people in Westerly looked at it and said that's not our town this is Island Pond here's our Grand Trunk railway station so somehow Sample just submitted said this will do for Rhode Island they mixed up somewhere two scenes of Island Pond ended up winning this 48 states competition neither one was ever painted unfortunately it just the whole they both went belly up and there's actually another entry by Pepino Mangrovit this was his proposal for Island Pond completely different so showing the range of possibilities that artists were compositionally exploring and it's maple sugaring again but you can see the difference from these sort of phased step one step two, step three approach to Barst Miller and Paul Samples just straight on single scene kind of snapshot views I think maybe spatially compositionally using the whole wall surface and it's requirements are never slighted I don't know exactly what that means oh she's making maple candy it's a little mold yes or flipping hamburgers whichever you prefer so luckily the murals today they're all intact they're all in pretty good condition mostly because they're up high they're good 8 to 10 feet off the floor so nobody can touch them nobody can bang a mail card into them or scrape them in any way so generally they're in pretty good shape and but as I said with the north field a lot of people don't even take the time to look up and just think about what they're seeing so hopefully we can raise awareness at the very least that they're there and it seems like the postmasters appreciate them they were all very welcoming and said take all the pictures you want when I would show up so they appreciate them a couple other examples around the state that are not post office murals this was a federal arts project by Steven Belaske he did the Rutland post office and these are enormous that central panel is probably at least 15 feet wide and they're in the stairwell of the main entry to the building and on the other wall is this corresponding piece also federal arts project other examples of art from the new deal this is the Emma Willard monument which is in Middlebury it's on a little island kind of in that crazy intersection where you either continue on 7 or go downtown but really a beautifully carved low relief marble piece by Marion Guild and Pierre Zwick who designed it this was a federal arts project and these things turn up this was last fall I got an email from UVM saying we broke into a wall and found a painting so I scurried over there and they were doing demolition started ripping off sheet rock and found a painting behind the wall so this was a public works of art project depicting the Champlain thrust fault at Lone Rock Point in Burlington Bay very famous geological feature and this had actually been painted for the Fleming Museum when it had a collection of geology specimens and was then removed to this building and glued to the wall and decades ago they wanted to remodel they couldn't get the painting off the wall so they just built a wall in front of it it was actually a really good solution they just said we don't want to wreck it we're just going to leave it and build in front of it where was this painting where is the subject matter or the so the painting now which building it used to house the geology department before that moved to Delahante I can't remember the name of the building though but the painting has since been removed so they hired a conservator who came out very carefully carefully detached the glue from the wall surface rolled it up, stabilized everything and it'll be conserved and then reinstalled in Delahante Hall where the geology department is today and it's great because every fall intro to geology the classes have to trek out to this spot and draw this and so now they can look at it every day so but these things turn up you never know where they might be in terms of buildings programs there were a couple primary sources of construction the CCC Civilian Conservation Corps the PWA Public Works Administration and the Resettlement Administration and in Vermont we have some amazing examples of CCC work that's modernist this is very unusual most CCC work around the country was indigenous to the local area so if you're in New Mexico the CCC was building with Adobe if you're in New England they were using log but this architect David Freed somehow managed to get approved for this project this is the ski lodge at Mount Mansfield it's still there today it's log and rustic but this is cutting edge modernist design this wall of windows and you can see this historic view and the CCC not only were they building buildings they were building ski trails this is I think nose dive or one of the they basically built the ski industry in Vermont in the 1930s Vermont Forester Perry Merrill saw that here's thousands of young men start cutting trail so still would not exist today were it not for the CCC the ski industry owes its life to the CCC really another very interesting project at Crystal Stake Park in Barton also by David Freed and again very modern form but I think the way Freed was able to get these approved was partly I think because it was Vermont and the signature blocks from Washington DC on the plans are not signed I think DC said it's Vermont just do it it's far away nobody will know so these very modern design but common material this is brick and stone board and batten siding wood siding on the lower levels very easy to build but in a new form so this isn't certainly not a quaint old rustic log cabin but it's using materials and construction techniques that were very familiar to the young men building these another and this is more typical CCC the Hubbard cabin at the Middlebury snowball this cabin is still there it's in rough shape but it's still there and then buildings this is the Cabot Village School this was a public works administration project where they really wanted to have projects that had a direct public impact and certainly in Vermont this is when there were still a lot of one room school houses so here's a consolidated school designed by Freeman French Freeman architects of Burlington and this was actually featured in a national publication about the PWA as a really good example of a good project and imagine if you lived in Cabot and suddenly here's the government coming in and saying we're going to build you this beautiful new school that would mean a lot and I just found this morning so at Cabot, being thrifty Vermonters every New Deal project had a sign that said what the agency was what the project was so here's Cabot School project number da da da da they recycled the sign as the backboard for their basketball hoop that's how thrifty we are yeah the sign was a federal property so they put it to good use and this was picked up in correspondence at the federal level like look what they did in Cabot so really wonderful but other projects, Southwick Hall at UVM this was a PWA project, McKinney, Mead & White were the architects so this wasn't simply little rural simple projects this was a major building that really had an impact this is at the time when the Redstone campus was the women's campus at UVM and here's a major investment in a facility for women attending the university so that has a huge impact Tracy Hall in Norwich their town hall this was a PWA project and another one of my favorites the Sewage Disposal Plant in St. Albans have you ever seen a more beautiful sewage disposal plant look at the striped canvas awnings rock lined gravel paths I think this some sort of settling tank up here with St. Albans sewage plant spelled out in white rocks landscaped grounds I mean this is really cream of the crop here yeah so the PWA everything from you know curbs and gutters to full sewage treatment plants runs the gamut so bridges yeah and again if you lived in St. Albans this was a big deal suddenly you've got a municipal sewage plant that's huge it's a pivotal change in Vermont life yes yep yep so these are all federally funded under Roosevelt's New Deal and really just trying to get that cash infusion and not simply dumping money into projects but also employing people you know putting them to work and here in Montpelier recognize that the largest earthwork pool in the world when it was built not only I'm glad you asked newspaper accounts say that it was the largest asphalt pool in the country that held 1 million and 27 gallons so Montpelier was when I was a child they said there was a larger one in Switzerland I don't believe it but here's the recreation fields with the pool, the bath house the baseball stadium over here the football field, soccer field in the middle this was all a PWA project and there's a historic site marker but you know darn it even that it was PWA it's tough but another thing I love about this picture is look at the landscape totally clear cut a lot of change Union Elementary School this was also a PWA project this by architect Robert Graham from New York again this was a big deal for Montpelier to get this beautiful public school building and really see this investment in their community from the federal government the tower at Hubbard Park Civilian Conservation Corps 1936 they worked on this I think for about four years right yeah sort of rustic stonework my dad worked on this oh really yeah so these things that we tend to take for granted today they're easy to just assume well it's always been there they haven't the CCC was amazing go to pretty much any state park that existed pre-1950 it was a CCC state park the pathways the roads, the shelters the picnic areas, the fire pits all CCC yes there was a whole CCC camp in Waterbury and I think some of the chimney stacks are still standing little river there's a camp there it could be another big project of these New Deal programs and the CCC was reforestation and you can always spot a CCC forest because the trees are perfect spaced every six feet on a grid absolutely perfectly aligned they just took their saplings and charted out a grid and planted them all so not just yes like the cornfield okay so that yep yep so that could certainly be one of those reforestation projects yes yep the Waterbury dam yep flood control dams uh they haha so yeah a lot of these plantings are aging out yep right yep tragic fire there yeah that was a very unfortunate accident and with the CCC there were the camps that they actually lived in so they built their own living quarters and then there are the projects they built very few of those camps remain I know at Camp Downer yes I forget what town that's in is it South Royalton Sharon some of their buildings are actually converted CCC camp buildings they survived so like I said there's things out there once you start looking hmm yeah so it's still active so I can't not mention the wood gallery it's right next door to us and they are the repository for works of art created under the WPA federal art project basically when all these new deal programs ended in 1942 because of World War 2 there were traveling exhibits all over the country of work created by artists from all over the country and basically the WPA said stop whatever exhibit you have right now keep it and they designated a repository in each state and the wood gallery really being one of the only art galleries in the state at the time was officially designated as a repository for the federal art project works so in that collection it's totally random paintings of the Brooklyn bridge New Mexico desert you know it's not like Vermont scenes it's from all over the country and it's really worth checking out if you haven't seen it they've got a great collection there and several of the artists who did murals also have smaller easel pieces and drawings in the wood gallery collection so you can start to better understand these artists and how they were working and what they were dealing with in the 1930s right yeah yeah they would transport these exhibits around the country because remember one of the goals was to get art to the people and so they would tens of thousands of works of art were created under these the federal art project alone so they would pick some of the best examples put together an exhibit send it off to Ohio to Indiana to Vermont to Maine and traveling all over the country and then when these programs ended they just said keep it yeah and that work is actually still property of the federal government federal government still owns these works of art because they were paid for with public money so over the railroad track on the sketch for the island pond thing that was done for westerly my father was born and grew up in island pond when I was a little boy that bridge was still there and in the mid 1930s my paternal grandfather died of a heart attack he had on that wow jeez yes there are stories of essentially warehouses full of art that at the end of the day like what do we do with this stuff and a lot of it did get destroyed yes the bellows falls murals yep yep children's room of the saint john's I don't think I've been in there I will check maybe a mural in the saint john's very library children's room alright how about the children's room that had fabulous murals do you know anything about them I think they were painted oh really oh did they get flooded question in the back I don't know if there's a list online they do have guidance on line general services administration gsa now controls this collection they have guidance on line of what to do if you think you know you see an auction listing that's clearly a federal arts project piece let them know but I don't know if they have a list of things they're looking for because there are so many tens of thousands of prints and drawings and paintings and ceramics and not always not always sometimes there'd be a little brass tack on the frame or something but if the piece has been re-framed or somebody pops off the plaque it's tough to track them down yes nope yeah I'm not sure exactly how the decisions were made as to what what post office was worthy of a mural in the 30s here was built during the Heisenberg administration and for that it was I think it was he says it's the Hayes administration that was a long time ago and they weren't painting murals on post offices great all right one more did you do any work on theater murals, theater curtains no that's a whole other topic you know that's not that I'm aware of I didn't come across any records for like theater curtains being commissioned through the federal arts project I think of those as more late 19th early 20th century but you know you never know there could be some out there so great well thank you very much for your time appreciate it