In a nutshell: Public art celebrating organized labor has often been a matter of controversy, and became so once again this week in Maine, providing an opportunity for teachers to explore public art and organized labor in their classrooms.
In March 2011, Gov. Paul LePage, Republican of Maine, ordered a 36-foot-wide mural removed from the state’s Department of Labor building in Augusta after several business officials complained about it and the governor received an anonymous fax saying it was reminiscent of murals used to brainwash the masses in communist North Korea. On Monday, Jan. 14, twenty-two months after the governor’s order to remove the mural set off a political firestorm and spawned a federal lawsuit, the 11-panel mural depicting the state’s labor history was returned to public display in the atrium leading to the Maine State Museum in Augusta.
This is far from the first political controversy over public art celebrating the working class, the labor movement, and organized labor. A notable example was the ignominious fate met by Diego Rivera’s Man at the Crossroads, a mural commissioned in 1934 for the lobby of 30 Rockefeller Center by none other than Nelson Rockefeller himself, who turned to Rivera, one of his mother’s favorite artists, when his own first choices, modernist masters and rivals Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, both proved to be unavailable.
Rockefeller asked Rivera to remove the image of Lenin from the mural in progress, but he refused, instead offering to add Abraham Lincoln. Although Rivera was paid his commission in full, the mural remained literally under wraps, and was finally destroyed without ever being put on display. The dramatic dispute between Rockefeller and Rivera has been immortalized on film, in Cradle Will Rock (1999) and Frida (2002).
Using photographs taken by an assistant, Rivera repainted the mural on a smaller scale for display at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. At Rockefeller Center, its intended place was taken by American Progress, a mural by Spanish painter Jose Maria Sert, with Abraham Lincoln as its focal point.
The incident in Maine provides teachers with an opportunity to raise a wide range of issues in the classroom, including public art, organized labor, and the kinds of controversies they can provoke. As reported in The New York Times, Gov. LePage has repeatedly clashed with labor unions, advocating a higher retirement age for public employees and right-to-work legislation that would undermine the strength of labor unions. He even ordered the Labor Department to rename its seven conference rooms, objecting to rooms honoring labor leaders César Chávez, Rose Schneiderman, and Frances Perkins (the nation’s first female labor secretary, who is buried in Maine). What connections do students see between the disputes over art, or the commemorative naming of conference rooms, and those over actual labor policy?
Teaching opportunities do not end with organized labor. Public art has often been controversial in other arenas, too. For example, the plaque displaying the Ten Commandments on the facade of the Chester County courthouse in suburban Pennsylvania; the 43-foot-tall cross atop Mount Soledad in La Jolla, California; and even the controversy sparked by the minimalistic design of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the Mall in Washington, DC. What connections do students see between these disputes over art and the related issues of separation of church and state or the sensitivities around memorializing the ultimate sacrifice made by veterans of foreign wars?