Democracy in Action

February 6, 2021 8:34 PM

Waylande Gregory's ceramic mural in a courtyard of D.C.'s Daly building, Democracy in Action depicts municipal workers directing traffic, putting out fires, and beating African Americans. At its unveiling, the police department protested and the mayor asked for the murals removal and destruction. Eleanor Roosevelt and Paul Manship, representing the US Fine Arts Commission, intervened and save it. The panel remained but the entrance door to the courtyard to view the frieze was locked in 1941. The mural was funded by the lesser known New Deal program Federal Project Number One, which funded thousands of art, music, literature and theater projects, employing up to 40000 artists.
posted by adept256 (22 comments total)

Wow, this is like a mural in Pawnee City Hall.
posted by jonathanhughes at 8:38 PM on February 6, 2021 [8 favorites]

Federal One deserves a post all it's own. Awesome logo for the Federal Art Project. Dive into the wiki, the beneficiaries are as diverse as Orson Welles, Jackson Pollack, Saul Bellow and Katherine Dunham. There was a project to collect oral histories and enslaved people's narratives.

We all remember the huge infrastructure projects, but this relatively small program really kept the arts surviving during the hard times.
posted by adept256 at 8:45 PM on February 6, 2021 [5 favorites]

Court houses, post offices, schools, civic centers and libraries all over the country were decorated with murals and friezes by these projects during the Depression...
posted by jim in austin at 8:57 PM on February 6, 2021

Something something cancel culture.

Seriously, it's a great mural and hearing that Eleanor Roosevelt helped preserve it confirms my feeling that she was a much better person than her husband.
posted by Joe in Australia at 10:15 PM on February 6, 2021 [1 favorite]

Did Gregory mean to imply that the police were appropriately doing their job or that they were behaving outrageously? Is there any way to tell?
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 2:55 AM on February 7, 2021 [2 favorites]

Well, the police didn't like it, so presumably …
posted by Joe in Australia at 3:35 AM on February 7, 2021 [4 favorites]

Nancy Lebovitz: "Did Gregory mean to imply that the police were appropriately doing their job or that they were behaving outrageously? "

¿Por qué no los dos?

That may be the point.
posted by chavenet at 4:10 AM on February 7, 2021 [1 favorite]

I think it's grossly offensive. The white supremacist culture it symbolizes still exists and is growing. If Gregory was trying to make a point, it's a terrible way to make that point. Racist brutality has been structural in the US for hundreds of years. However the daily concrete reality of this brutality often lies outside the lived experience of those making the various aesthetic and philosophical arguments about its depiction.
posted by carter at 4:38 AM on February 7, 2021

Is the courtyard available to people with offices in the building? If not, how much must it suck to not be able to use that space to say eat lunch just because of a mural depicting cops being cops? Quite the counterpoint to the reaction of the recent removal of Confederate monuments.
posted by Mitheral at 4:51 AM on February 7, 2021 [3 favorites]

Based on the Wikipedia article, it's hard to know what Gregory's own political sentiments were – sounds like most of his work was generic, apolitical public art for corporate and municipal clients.

However, if this work upset the cops, then it seems reasonable to suppose that Gregory knew it would upset the cops. It is, after all, an artist's job to anticipate how their work will be received and understood by its various audiences – and he was in a much better position to make that judgment than we are, 80 years on.

(For whatever that might be worth.)

I think it's grossly offensive. ... If Gregory was trying to make a point, it's a terrible way to make that point.

I don't have a strong opinion either way – but I would be interested to hear your reasons for feeling this way about it, if you're inclined to elaborate.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 5:12 AM on February 7, 2021

Quite the counterpoint to the reaction of the recent removal of Confederate monuments.

Yup. And I think it would also suck to be Black and to have to eat your sandwiches in a courtyard looking at a mural on a city police building that depicts Black people getting beaten up by the police ...
posted by carter at 5:17 AM on February 7, 2021 [4 favorites]

I would be interested to hear your reasons for feeling this way about it, if you're inclined to elaborate.

I guess there are many reasons. For example, it's an officially sanctioned work of art on a government building that depicts instutionalised racist violence. So, for example, you could be in that courtyard surrounded by other employees who actually thought the scene was great, and depicted part of their mission. You could be (as I responded to Mitheral above) Black, sitting in the courtyard eating your sandwiches, and listening to white conversations about how it was fun to beat up Black people.
posted by carter at 5:27 AM on February 7, 2021 [1 favorite]

Its the mural equivalent (now) of those 9 panel "We are grateful for (Not You) all your hard work" memes.

I have no idea if it was intended as such but I think seeing two sets of workers helping as cops being bastard criminals is appropriate.
posted by Slackermagee at 6:13 AM on February 7, 2021

Given that it was a here in TX that a Black constable was put in a basement office near a "historic" Jim Crow-era sign reading "Negroes", and was not happy about it, yeah I can't imagine a Black employee wants to see that mural every day.

The thing about racist (or apparently racist) art is that if you're going to display it you have to contextualize it. If that section of the mural was displayed in a way that did so, and made clear that We Don't Think Racism is Ok, you could do it. But I still wouldn't without having a panel of Black historians and local people weigh in on it.
posted by emjaybee at 6:36 AM on February 7, 2021 [4 favorites]

It would be interesting to know more about the public controversy when the mural was first unveiled. Who was criticizing it, who was defending it, and what were their interests and their specific arguments?

That said, this kinda feels like a situation where there are no great answers.

This artist might've intended to criticize police brutality – but his execution was arguably pretty tone-deaf, for reasons that others have articulated.

Hiding the mural behind a locked door seems, at first blush, like an attempt to suppress criticism of MPD – but it might also be defensible as a solution to the "people don't want to eat lunch under a mural of police brutality" problem.

(Removing or modifying the mural might be the best solution to that problem, since it would make the courtyard usable again – but that seems likely to be politically fraught, precisely because the mural can be plausibly interpreted as a criticism of police brutality.)

I guess I agree with emjaybee: at the very least, the historical context of the work (whatever that might turn out to be) should be made clear.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 7:19 AM on February 7, 2021 [1 favorite]

My eye sees this as a moment, itself a historical context, rendered in unflinching and brutal terms. In part, it's an admission. It's a sobering reminder that, no matter how far we'd like to think we've come, we still have a long way to go. As a white person, I, too, would find this to be an uncomfortable reminder that overlooks my lunch break. I don't want to be associated with the hate-filled faces of the cops on the far end of the mural. I would rather be like the firemen. But there it is.
posted by mule98J at 7:52 AM on February 7, 2021 [2 favorites]

Maybe I'm looking at this wrong. The police could be seen defending the guy on the ground from the man with the knife. I didn't notice the guy had a knife and had his foot on the guy with the torn shirt. Are they even African American? I'm doubting my initial assumptions. The article didn't help.

Though, since stopping violence is part of the job, why wouldn't they want that to be shown?
posted by adept256 at 8:10 AM on February 7, 2021 [1 favorite]

I spent hours waiting in the lobbies of federal buildings around Chicago when I was a kid. There was always some ginormous mural to look at. I forgot about that until 9-11 and started block printing travel posters for places nobody wants to see. (Ski Afghanistan!)

I kept wanting bigger linoleum blocks and paper and finally started making both on my own and using a sod roller after the horse refused to roll across the paper anymore. It was then I remembered why I wanted to work large.

I could get the inks wholesale but I had to make everything else and it cost thousands to do one eight by twelve foot poster. I am envious of anyone who could get funding for work of this scale.

I talk to artists who have to make a large painting "to match the couch."

Please don't commission art for your couch.
posted by Mr. Yuck at 8:28 AM on February 7, 2021 [9 favorites]

According to the Smithsonian, it's 'police apprehending criminals on foot.'

Mural is composed of 500 ceramic tiles depicting the functions of the District of Columbia Police Department, Fire Department, and of the Department of Motor Vehicles. The five scenes of the frieze portray, left to right, traffic officials directing vehicles at a busy downtown intersection, traffic officials helping pedestrians along a sidewalk while a crowd of demonstrators carry placards in the background, firemen fighting a fire with water hoses while a child is carried to safety wrapped in a blanket, police apprehending criminals on foot, and the police motorcycle squad stopping to return a lost dog to a concerned boy.

https://collections.si.edu/search/detail/edanmdm:siris_ari_343412?q=record_ID%3Asiris_ari_343412&record=1&hlterm=record_ID%3Asiris_ari_343412
posted by carter at 8:35 AM on February 7, 2021

I have good memories of helping my sister's boyfriend print a rather large room sized linoleum carving. Almost certainly because it was a one time thing. Pretty sure I would have told him to fuck right off of he'd asked me to do that again. Daylight hours on a weekend were for sleeping, not working.
posted by wierdo at 9:35 AM on February 7, 2021 [1 favorite]

Some additional context from an art historian in an article in the Journal of American Art Pottery Association:

"[Gregory] had employed an African American father and son team to help move and tend to such huge ceramic projects at his Bound Brook home and studio with its huge kilns. In fact, Tyson, the father, and his son, Ralph (their last names remain unknown), had lived on the third floor of Gregory’s home at the time of the creation of “Democracy in Action.” But since Gregory no longer required them for subsequent work, he was forced to release them. But it may seem safe to wonder that in the three or more years that the duo lived with him, that they may have expressed discomfort with the police which may have had an effect on the artist’s negative interpretation of them in his mural. After all, they assisted Gregory in the mural’s creation."
posted by basalganglia at 10:35 AM on February 7, 2021 [4 favorites]

Though, since stopping violence is part of the job, why wouldn't they want that to be shown?

FWIW, the officers with their frowning faces and big hats look pretty menacing, almost a little like secret police. Both in the brutality scene and the bringing a suspect to the police wagon scene.
posted by Apocryphon at 11:03 AM on February 8, 2021