Podcast appearances and mentions of victor arnautoff

On this week's show: Stick Together, Australia's only national radio show focusing on industrial, social and workplace issues, talks with an organizer from the Games Workers Union. Then, from Talking SMART, the podcast of the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers, B4ALL, the Belonging and Excellence for All Project. Next, "Town Destroyers"; Work Week Radio looks at an important new documentary film about the Victor Arnautoff murals and the ongoing battles over history in our schools. Our last piece today comes from OEA Grow, the podcast from the Oregon Education Association; today they share advice from veteran educator Rob Hillhouse. Please help us build sonic solidarity by clicking on the share button below. Highlights from labor radio and podcast shows around the country, part of the national Labor Radio Podcast Network of shows focusing on working people's issues and concerns. #LaborRadioPod @AFLCIO @stick__together @smartunionworks @labormedianow @oregoneducation Edited by Patrick Dixon, produced by Chris Garlock; social media guru Mr. Harold Phillips.

 Director: Alan Snitow, Deborah Kaufman Is art's role to provoke or placate? What happens when it no longer reflects current societal views? These questions and many more were the subject of hot debate when Victor Arnautoff's thirteen-panel mural “The Life of Washington” became an object of local controversy, then a media firestorm. On display since San Francisco's George Washington High School opened in 1936, it offers a view of the Founding Father both celebratory and critical, referencing his involvements in slavery and Native American genocide. (The Iroquois dubbed him “Town Destroyer.”) But some present-day students, parents, and observers found those depictions racially offensive, calling for the work to be removed or destroyed. Would doing so be a “redaction of history,” “identity politics gone off the rails”—or a justified blow to a lingering American “colonized mentality” as well as ongoing “traumatization” of young minds? Longtime Bay Area documentarians Alan Snitow and Deborah Kaufman interview historians, artists, activists, and GWHS students to probe a fascinating microcosm of today's culture wars. —Dennis HarveySee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

 Director: Alan Snitow, Deborah Kaufman Is art's role to provoke or placate? What happens when it no longer reflects current societal views? These questions and many more were the subject of hot debate when Victor Arnautoff's thirteen-panel mural “The Life of Washington” became an object of local controversy, then a media firestorm. On display since San Francisco's George Washington High School opened in 1936, it offers a view of the Founding Father both celebratory and critical, referencing his involvements in slavery and Native American genocide. (The Iroquois dubbed him “Town Destroyer.”) But some present-day students, parents, and observers found those depictions racially offensive, calling for the work to be removed or destroyed. Would doing so be a “redaction of history,” “identity politics gone off the rails”—or a justified blow to a lingering American “colonized mentality” as well as ongoing “traumatization” of young minds? Longtime Bay Area documentarians Alan Snitow and Deborah Kaufman interview historians, artists, activists, and GWHS students to probe a fascinating microcosm of today's culture wars. —Dennis HarveySee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In Episode One of Banished, we covered the controversy around Victor Arnautoff's murals, “Life of Washington” — a series of 13 paintings that cover the entrance and the hallway of George Washington High School in San Francisco. One of the voices in the episode was Professor Dewey Crumpler, an artist who was commissioned to paint so-called “response” murals to Arnautoff’s in the late 1960s when “Life of Washington” first became controversial. In this extended interview, Crumpler waxes lyrical not just about the mural controversy, but also about the place of art in society.“The most important place for young people to confront difficulty is in high school just before you get into the world,” Crumpler told us. “If it’s in the world, it’s for me. If it’s in the world, I have a right to know it. I have a right to experience it. And it’s my youth that helps prepare me for it, even though it will be problematic. That’s how we learn to overcome the difficulties.”Normally, extended guest interviews will only be available to paying subscribers, but we’re sharing this one with all of you to give you a taste of the kind of content you can expect if you subscribe to Booksmart Studios. * FULL TRANSCRIPT *KHALID: This is Banished, and I'm Amna Khalid. Welcome to a special subscriber-only episode of Banished. We're sharing this one with all of you to give you a taste of the kind of content we have in store for paying subscribers to Booksmart Studios. In Episode One, we covered the controversy around Victor Arnautoff's murals, Life of Washington, which is a series of 13 paintings that cover the entrance and the hallway of George Washington High School in San Francisco. These paintings, which were commissioned in the 1930s as part of the New Deal Art Initiative, have recently come under fire. Some people in the community see the imagery as offensive, even traumatizing. For example, one of the murals depicts a dead Native American lying face down on the ground as Washington's troops walk past in their pursuit of westward expansion. Another portrays enslaved African Americans picking cotton and working at Mount Vernon. Just recently, the school board voted to cover the murals with panels at a cost of three quarters of a million dollars. But the alumni association has fought back and filed a lawsuit to prevent this from happening. As part of my research for the story, I interviewed Professor Dewey Crumpler, an artist who was commissioned to paint so-called “response murals” to Arnautoff’s in the late 1960s when Life of Washington first became controversial. Professor Crumpler was only 19 when he painted his set of three murals titled Multiethnic Heritage, which depict the historic contributions and struggles of African Americans, Native Americans, Asians, and other minority groups. Today, Professor Crumpler, who is based at the San Francisco Art Institute, integrates digital imagery, video, and traditional painting techniques to explore themes of globalization and the reduction of culture from a way of life to a mere commodity. Over the next 20 minutes, Professor Crumpler will discuss some of his other work, how he came to paint the response murals, and the importance of context in interpreting art. I had heard that Professor Crumpler saw those horrific photos of Emmett Till's brutalized body at a very young age. I began our conversation by asking him to reflect on that moment.CRUMPLER: Seeing that image of Emmett Till as a six-year-old was traumatizing. And some of the students at George Washington High School were traumatized by seeing that image of a Native American on the ground dead. I empathize completely with those students and felt their pain. And I use that example in relationship to how one comes to grips with difficulty and how important it is for young people to know that they have support, but that the world is complicated, and they will learn to cope. Now, it became more apparent to me that art, that creativity, could do something very important. And so, I understood at a very early age that this was what I wanted to do.KHALID: Could you tell us a little bit about how you identify as an artist? How would you describe who you are?CRUMPLER: Well, culturally I identify as a African American. I don't shy away from that hyphenated reality. I identify myself not as an artist, but as a maker. I think the term “artist” is a flying signifier that moves in any direction that the culture deems necessary at a given moment. But a maker, which is what I believe myself to be, is capable of moving in any direction that interests them spiritually and physically and cognitively to express themselves in the world. And since I was a small child, I believed firmly in that power, because the power of creativity is an extraordinary power. And it really is personal in the sense that it is a projection of my ideas and feelings into the world. I see the creative process as a real privilege and as a real calling. I take it deeply seriously. That's sort of how I see myself as a maker.KHALID: Let me pull you a little bit towards your container series. You've done a whole series of drawings and paintings and imagery that is depicting containers on ships. And as I was seeing some of those works, there was a lot about our current political moment, about movement of things and human beings that was speaking to me. May I ask you to elaborate on that?CRUMPLER: I'd come back from Europe for the first time, and I'd become engaged with tulips because I went to Amsterdam, and I went to the Keukenhof Gardens. And I didn't see them as flowers. I saw them as history, the history of how a flower could become a commodity and how that commodity could become as important as human beings. In fact, they were treated like human beings. They were cultivated for their qualities, and they were experimented on. And their biology changed to create French tulips and German tulips and all these different kinds of tulips. When I got a bit older, I was attracted to the piers in Oakland, California. And I spent years going around those piers, and I wondered one day: why was I paying so much attention to these piers, to this place? It was the water, and it was those ships. And those ships had containers on them. And those containers were full of different colors like those tulips. And those ships really signaled to me time. Because the containers had ridges and those ridges created shadows. And shadows automatically signified time. And because they were about a rhythmic relationship to time, I saw them as similar to what has happened through American history. You could take containers and drop them off anywhere in the world, and they would operate the same everywhere in the world. And I was thinking that this is very much a system that is organized to reinforce capitalism, just like the transportation of bodies after Prince Henry developed a relationship to the caravel, which made the caravel the most efficient vehicle on the seas and permitted those so-called “explorers” to move across the planet, putting down stakes of ownership so that they could reinforce capitalism. And that's why in all those paintings that I made about containers, they're not really about containers. The containers are really markers of Cortez landing on the shores of South America. And those containers and their shadows are about the past, not about the present. They look like the present, but they are about the same system that has existed all the way back to the Phoenicians.KHALID: Our conversation eventually turned to the subject of Arnautoff's murals and Professor Crumpler's own response murals that hang in George Washington High School in San Francisco. I asked him how he understood the sensibilities of the students back in the 1960s who first objected to these murals.CRUMPLER: Well, first of all, I was one of those students. I was not much older than them. They were seniors in high school, and I was moving into my second year at Arts and Crafts in Oakland. I had been making artwork that followed the civil rights movement. And remember also that the 1960s was the hot point of the Black Power movement. And the Black Power movement was about identity and about the acquisition of power, and power meant the knowledge of yourself as a Black person in a country that stripped you of your knowledge of self. When they made a statement that they wanted those murals changed and taken down, the district said they were not going to do this, the students protested, and that's when I became involved, because the students, several of which had seen my work, wanted me to make another mural. The board said no, because I had no proven skills, I was a kid. A week or two later, some ink was thrown on the mural and that made the board decide, “OK, we're going to let him do it.” I told the students that I would make the mural, and I would make a great mural equal to the mural in that other room. You know, the hubris of a young kid. And that I would only make the mural if they left that mural in place, because Arnautoff was trying to expose a history that should be told and understood, even though he knew that the imagery was not easy imagery.KHALID: If I'm remembering your quotation correctly, you said your murals make no sense if Arnautoff's murals are taken away. CRUMPLER: He wanted to tell a truth about the contradiction of a founding father who signed a document that said, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and endowed with certain inalienable rights.” He and those other signers of the great document, and it is a great document, while standing on the neck — while standing on the neck of African peoples who are under his boot, laying on the ground that belongs to the millions of Native Americans who also have died — shed blood fighting for their right to their space. So, I wanted to engage that idea of the founding, that idea of Native Americans, that idea of African Americans, that idea of Asians. I went to Mexico to learn mural painting. I had no doubt that I could paint that mural because my passion was in it. And I tried to create a worthy dialogue. But of course, once I had made that mural, the school board relaxed, and they didn't do what I said at the dedication they should do. You have to use those murals as teaching tools, and you have to put plaques next to them that explain them. Every generation is different. They confront new issues. And therefore, you have to give them information, otherwise they will misunderstand all the implications and symbolisms that are all over those murals. Whether it's Arnautoff or my mural in the future, unless something is done to explain them, to make them clear, this will crop up again. And censorship and cancel culture is all around us. That's why art has to be free to do its work, even though it can make individuals very upset and angry. It's a worthy subject, that an inanimate object can actually do something to a human being, can make a human being think, can make a human being angry. But the point is, you have to work your way through it. Working your way through it is the point of life itself.KHALID: So, Professor Crumpler, this is fascinating because what you're saying is that the school board reneged on its responsibility and promise, if I can say that, to contextualize these murals and to put up plaques explaining where they're coming from, which you had requested.CRUMPLER: Yes. Let me just say that the most important place for young people to confront difficulty is in high school, just before you get into the world. So, a young person seeing difficult imagery — that’s a perfect opportunity for teaching. OK, you're not going to read Huckleberry Finn because of some words. They're offensive. I was offended by them. But if it's in the world, it’s for me. If it's in the world, I have a right to it. I have a right to know it. I have a right to experience it. And it's my youth that helps prepare me for it, even though it will be problematic. That's how we learn to overcome the difficulties. But those murals have to be contextualized. When you are young, everything looks larger than it is. When I saw those murals in 1966, I was incensed by them, and they looked huge. When I came back to engage them, they were much smaller, and I had come to understand much profoundly why he used those images. In fact, one of the people who had been most vociferous about taking those walls down, once he, like me, had graduated from college, he apologized to me: “Mr. Crumpler, I really appreciate what you painted. I appreciate those murals greatly. But if I understood what Arnautoff was doing, I would have never done what we did.” He couldn't have come to that realization if I joined them and said, “Yes, let's tear this s**t down, and when we tear it down, I'll paint over every bit of it.”KHALID: Professor Crumpler, one final question, what would you say to those on the school board today who have voted to cover up Arnautoff’s murals?CRUMPLER: All great art tells difficult truths. And they are always confronted with people who speak against them. And then they become central to the expression of human liberty. Arnautoff was a frail person, he was not some kind of heroic giant. He was just a maker trying to demonstrate a contradiction. He used imagery that functioned in its time. But it's imagery based on a truth: that Native American lying on that ground, representing all of us who have struggled.KHALID: Since I spoke with Professor Crumpler, a court has ruled on the petition by the alumni association to keep the murals up. Just this week, a state judge found that the school board hadn't fully considered all the alternatives to covering the mural. So, for now, the murals stay up. Of course, the school board may still appeal the decision, which means that we may not have heard the last of this case. But the broader questions remain. What is the place of controversial art in society? How do we reckon with difficult historical truths? Can we find a way to acknowledge the pain that some may experience without completely whitewashing the past?If you enjoyed this conversation and would like to have access to more exclusive content, please consider becoming a paying subscriber. You can learn more about this show and our other offerings by going to BooksmartStudios.org. Banished is produced by Matthew Schwartz and Mike Vuolo. N'Dinga Gaba and Chris Mandra mixed the audio.This is Banished. I’m Amna Khalid. This is a public episode. 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In the mid-1930s, Russian-born muralist Victor Arnautoff was commissioned by the New Deal’s Public Works of Art Project to paint a series of frescoes at sites around the San Francisco Bay Area. One of his more ambitious undertakings covered 1,600 square feet of wall space inside the lobby and stairwells of George Washington High School, depicting scenes from Washington’s life as a military leader and statesman. Parts of the work portray a slaughtered Native American and enslaved African-Americans, which Arnautoff — a Communist whose art was an outgrowth of his activism — deliberately foregrounded.Whatever his intentions at the time, Arnautoff is now at the center of a heated controversy among students, parents and community members, some of whom find the images traumatizing and want them “painted over” or removed. Host Amna Khalid spoke with those on both sides of the issue, equally passionate and resolute. She brings us the story.* FULL TRANSCRIPT* ALLISON COLLINS: A Native American that is dead on a wall and having people walk over him? That has cultural significance.DR. JOELY PROUDFIT: Enough is enough. Stop with the racism, stop with the dehumanization, stop with the genocidal artwork. Not in our public schools.COLLINS: That painful history is not something that needs to be consistently in children’s faces.JOHN LEARNED: Hey, as hard as those things are to look at, that's what really happened. There’s Indians that want to tell their history, they want people to know what happened.AMNA KHALID: This is a story of a painting — “Life of Washington,” by Russian artist Victor Arnautoff. It hangs on the walls of a high school in San Francisco. And I say walls because it’s actually 13 separate paintings covering 1600 square feet. It’s a series of vivid and sometimes violent vignettes from George Washington's life. The first panel is of Washington in his 20s. Later on, a scene from the French and Indian War. The Boston Tea Party. Winter at Valley Forge. Surrender at Yorktown.There are members of the community who find some of these images disturbing. Even traumatizing. One painting shows colonists walking past a Native American, dead on the ground. Another is of enslaved African-Americans on Washington’s plantation at Mount Vernon. Many students want the murals ... gone.Of course, it’s not that simple. First, there’s a logistical problem: these are frescoes, which means they were applied directly onto the wet plaster of the walls. But the bigger problem is philosophical: Should we remove the art? Because there are just as many who want these frescoes to stay exactly where they are — where they’ve been since 1936 — forcing us to confront the atrocities of America’s founding for nearly a century. But do they really belong… in a high school?I’m Amna Khalid, and this is Banished.How do we reckon with painful reminders of past sins? What responsibility do we have to shield our children — or adults for that matter — from material that they find offensive? What do we do about paintings and ideas, even people, that we now find unacceptable? Do we just cancel them? What does that even mean? In the case of one high school in San Francisco, it might mean destroying art.TRACY BROWN: The mural depicts violence and triggers emotional trauma, creating an unsafe environment which may get in the way of student learning.  This mural has had no teaching significance ...AMY ANDERSON: The depiction of indigenous warriors attacking white soldiers, who stand with the arms raised in surrender, erases the reality that George Washingtion ordered all-out war without diplomacy against indigenous peoples.TRONG: This mural is not teaching students about the history of slavery and indigenous genocide under George Washington or other settlers. Instead it is teaching students to normalize violence and death of our Black and indigenous communities. Paint it down.AK: Those are the voices of parents and students pleading with the San Francisco school board to paint over the mural. On social media, the movement is called “hashtag paint it down.” One of the women you heard was Amy Anderson. She’s an indigenous mother whose son was in 10th grade at the time. Here she is, again before the school board, on the image of the dead warrior face down on the ground.ANDERSON: The size and placement of the deceased American Indian warrior creates in me a deep sadness for the millions of indigenous people who were killed by forced assimilation or all-out war. With the signers of the U.S. Constitution, George Washington stands beside the fallen warrior, but not a single eye is diverted in his direction. There is no remorse for his death. And students and staff who are rushing to beat the bell breeze past this every day.AK: In June, 2019, the school board voted to paint over the murals. The total cost, including a lengthy environmental impact review, would run to about three quarters of a million dollars.PROUDFIT: My name is Dr. Joely Proudfit. I am Luiseño Payómkawichum. I am the director of the California Indian Culture and Sovereignty Center at Cal State San Marcos and the chair of the American Indian Studies Department at Cal State San Marcos.AK: Dr. Proudfit applauded the Board’s decision. She says the murals are from the perspective of European invaders, they are simply inaccurate and that they are dangerous.PROUDFIT: These false and harmful images do a number on our self-esteem and especially the self-esteem and the aspirations of our young people, especially our children. It reinforces negative stereotypes about non-native people. It keeps us in the past as a people that has been defeated or conquered in some capacity. It internalizes biases, stereotypes, misunderstandings, ignorance, furthers this notion of manifest destiny and colonization.AK: Interpreting art is obviously subjective. We could argue for years, and we have, over what these paintings are communicating. But perhaps a good place to start is with the artist himself. Do we have any idea of what Victor Arnautoff intended when he painted these murals?CHERNY: Arnautoff was living at a time when people on the left were very conscious of the oppression of people of color and wanted to dramatize that.AK: Robert Cherny is the author of Victor Arnautoff and the Politics of Art.CHERNY: And you see that in the four largest murals, he is centering people who were often being either ignored or actively erased. You know, the French and Indian wars mural puts a Native American in the center, the Revolutionary War puts working people in the center, Mount Vernon plantation puts enslaved Black people in the center and the settlement of the West puts a dead Native American in the center.AK: In centering the dead Native American, Arnautoff is critiquing fellow artists of the time, who portrayed colonization as worthy, even laudable.CHERNY: The white settlers are always painted in a fashion that makes it clear that they are being celebrated by the artist, that the artist is celebrating the settlement of the West by white men and women who are taking over empty territory. Arnautoff is breaking with that pattern to show that the white settlers were moving into territory that they had acquired by war, that they had acquired by killing the original inhabitants.AK: If those were Arnautoff’s intentions when he painted these murals, they haven’t always been interpreted that way. They first became controversial back in the 1960s, when Black students at the school started demanding more positive representations of African-Americans on the walls.Now what’s interesting is that the solution at that time was not to cover the murals, but to add even more art. The school commissioned a young Black artist named Dewey Crumpler to paint response murals. He would depict the historic struggles of African Americans, Native Americans and other minorities. Crumpler still lives in the Bay Area, and remembers that when he took the job he had one condition.CRUMPLER: I would only make the mural if they left that mural in place because Arnautoff was trying to expose a history that should be told and understood, even though he knew that the imagery was not easy imagery. He wanted to tell a truth about the contradiction of a Founding Father who signed a document that said, “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights.”He and those other signers of the Great Document, and it is a great document, while standing on the neck, while standing on the neck of African peoples who are under his boot, laying on the ground that belongs to the millions of Native Americans who also have died, shed blood, fighting for their right to their space.AK: There are certainly many Native Americans who agree with Dewey Crumpler that the murals are painful, but they are truthful and should remain. Robert Tamaka Bailey is a Choctaw elder who told me that these paintings are imbued with deep layers of symbolism and meaning. You just have to know where to look.BAILEY: And that’s the first thing that I saw in this one particular mural that had the dead native in it. If you looked in the bottom right hand corner, there's a chief that's sitting there handing a peace pipe over to a settler with his tomahawk behind the back of the settler. That’s the ways of the white man. What they did is they got us to lay our weapons down, came to us, try to make treaties, and then they took. They broke the treaty. What was pointed out to me later that I didn't notice was there's a tree right behind the chief, and if you looked at it, the branch is broken. Arnautoff was conveying there the broken treaties. And when I saw the images of the settlers stepping over the dead bodies of the native in gray — it's the only pictures of all of ’em that was not colored, it was in gray — I immediately thought, here's the gray area of what we're being taught about George Washington.AK: John Learned, of the Cheyenne Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, is another Native elder who wants these murals to stay. He sees them as a unique opportunity to remember and to address history.LEARNED: Unfortunately, it was a dark time for American Indians and that, that mural really has an opportunity to tell the story. And I think it'd be great if they, if they added that to their curriculum there in, in California to talk about what the United States and the state of California and the eradication efforts that they took to wipe out American Indians. When you get rid of something, it's gone. It’s finished. You're not talking about it and this mural in California has an opportunity to talk about the history.AK: I asked Dr. Proudfit, the professor at Cal State, what she would say to those Native Americans who are in favor of keeping the murals.PROUDFIT: It's like saying, well, we talked to some African-American folks and you know what, they're OK with the N-word so we're gonna go ahead and use it. No, no, no. And let me tell you how disingenuous the people who want to keep up these murals have been. They have gone so far as to go out of state, find some Native Americans, or self-defined Native Americans that agree with keeping these murals up. But you know what they don't do? They don't listen to the very people whose lands they are on who are opposed to it. And while, yes, not all of us think exactly alike. The majority, and we have ample evidence, when our own national associations like the APA, like the ASA, like Illuminative, have done national surveys to find that these types of images are harmful to us, take our majority word for it. It is inappropriate and we would not allow for this type of racist antics and imagery for any other population.AK: I looked at the surveys that Dr. Proudfit cited. The images that Native Americans were asked about, and that many actually found harmful, were of sports Mascots and other caricatures. They had nothing at all to do with the kind of artistic renditions in the murals.The evidence that I did find of what some Native Americans think about Arnautoff’s murals was from February, 2021. A group of Native American leaders from across the country wrote to the school board protesting the decision to cover the murals. The paintings, they concluded, should be used as educational tools.Of course, there is also the argument that this kind of art simply does not belong on the walls of a high school. Again, Dr. Proudfit.PROUDFIT: This is a public school that should provide safe working and learning environments for all students, not simply just native students, but all students. And so these harmful effects, these stereotypical harmful toxic narratives hurt not only native students, but non-native students who are still learning or have yet to learn about the original nations and people of this land. We would not tolerate this for any other population. What if George Washington High School had images painted by someone who's trying to depict dead Jewish people at the hands of Nazis. Do you think that would be okay to have those images up in a public school?AK: But hang on. Isn’t that part of being a student — contending with deplorable, even distressing, truths? That’s how Dewey Crumpler sees it.CRUMPLER: Let me just say that the most important place for young people to confront difficulty is in high school, just before you get into the world. So a young person seeing difficult imagery, that's a perfect opportunity for teaching. Okay, you're not going to read Huckleberry Finn because of some words. They're offensive. I was offended by them. But, if it's in the world, it's for me. If it's in the world, I have a right to it. I have a right to know it. I have a right to experience it, and it's my youth that helps prepare me for it, even though it will be problematic. That's how we learn to overcome the difficulties.CHERNY: I think we can probably assume that Arnatouff wanted them to be a bit disturbed.AK: Robert Cherny, the author of the book about Arnautoff, says that Arnautoff was deliberate in placing the murals. He wanted them to be precisely where they are, in the lobby and stairwells of a public high school.CHERNY: He wanted them to confront the reality that the settlement of the West had come at an enormous cost to the original inhabitants of the West. He said that it was expansion by war and peace, that he wanted the students to confront the fact that they were living in a place that had been taken from the first people by force. I think that Arnautoff wanted them to be troubled by the image that he was presenting there. He wanted them to be disturbed, I don't think he was trying to traumatize them or offend them, he was trying to get them to think.AK: But what about the fact that now we're in different times, maybe if he was alive today, he'd be part of, you know, people on the left who are campaigning for the rights of people of color, and that's perhaps what he was doing then. But now we know the history. How would you respond to people who say: Well, this may have been all well and good and revolutionary and wonderful when he painted them, but we have moved on and we no longer need these murals.CHERNY: Well, do we ever need art at all? I mean, there's a really big question here. If we disagree with something in the past, do we just erase it and pretend it never happened? You know, that's what Arnautoff was in fact objecting to in the way he presented his art. He was objecting to the erasure of people of color. He was objecting to the erasure of slavery and genocide. And if we say that, okay, maybe his intent was okay, but his intent is irrelevant, and therefore we have to just erase him and his art. I find that really very troubling because we, we’re not learning from it in that case. To me, the purpose of art, any art, is to make you think. And if it is purely decorative, it's not art, it's decoration. And I think that if we are going to ban art that makes you think because someone might be offended by thinking about those topics, then, you know, our culture is going to be a very sad one, I'm afraid. I hope I never see that.AK: In 1935, the San Francisco Chronicle published an interview with Victor Arnautoff. He told the paper: “As I see it, the artist is a critic of society.” What Arnautoff could not have foreseen was that decades later, society would become a critic of the artist.The longer I think about this issue, the more I find myself wondering, why must the solution be reduced to only two options: cover the murals OR let them stay up? Can’t we come up with a more creative solution? How about keeping the murals up and contextualizing them? Well it turns out, Dewey Crumpler suggested exactly this decades ago when he painted his response murals. He asked the school board to put up explanatory plaques alongside Arnautoff’s artwork, much the way museums do.CRUMPLER: Every generation is different. They confront new issues, and therefore you have to give them information, otherwise they will misunderstand all the implications and symbolisms that are all over those murals. Whether it's Arnautoff or my mural in the future, unless something is done to explain them, to make them clear, this will crop up again.AK: As it stands, these murals are devoid of any signposts that tell us where we are and what they might mean.CRUMPLER: Those murals have to be contextualized. And when you are young, everything looks larger than it is. When I saw those murals in 1966, I was incensed by them and they looked huge. When I came back to engage them, they were much smaller. And I’d come to understand profoundly why he used those images. In fact, one of the people who had been most vociferous about taking those walls down, once he, like me, had graduated from college, he apologized to me: “Mr. Crumpler, I really appreciate what you painted. I appreciate those murals greatly, but if I understood what Arnautoff was doing, I would’ve never done what we did.”He couldn't have come to that realization if I had joined them and said, “Yes, let's tear this s**t down. And when we tear it down, I'll paint over every bit of it.” Because they would have been prepared to do that, but the foresight of the board, because they were not going to permit this painting to be destroyed. And it was very important to all those board members and people who had been trained in the notion and understanding of art. But this new cohort of people, they're not trained in the arts, they don't really have that same sense of the importance of an artistic work.I tried to create a worthy dialogue but of course, once I had made that mural, the school board relaxed and they didn't do what I said at the dedication they should do. You have to use those murals as teaching tools and you have to put plaques next to them that explain them.AK: To my mind, that is the smartest solution. High school, where children are becoming adults, isprecisely the place where they need to confront troubling ideas. I asked Dr. Proudfit whether contextualizing Arnautoff’s murals by putting up written explanations might be a way forward.PROUDFIT: A public high school is not the place for that conversation, we are not at that point and we are far from that point. And the analysis or the example you just gave of the promise that was made 50 years ago, 60 years ago, and that that promise has went unmet, American Indians know about broken promises. We're very familiar with broken promises. This is a safety issue. This is a health and wellness issue. Okay, so if that means you take those walls out and you put them in storage until, I don't know, 10, 20, 30, 40, whenever people want to get around to telling the truth, and telling the truth from all sides, then maybe they can be brought out and have that discussion. But I would make a point to say that public high schools are not that place because we don't have the capacity, the information, the people, the structure to have those conversations. And so while that's a noble and nice idea, we are so far from that. And no, we don't believe that that will happen given the 50 years of lies.AK: Mark Sanchez is a member of the San Francisco school board. He says that, sadly, Dr. Proudfit is right, that the school will likely never put up these plaques.SANCHEZ: I don't have a lot of faith that that will happen, even if that's what the board decided to do.AK: Why? You have faith that something that hasn't been removed for so long, has stayed on the walls, now there is faith that we can remove it. Why not have faith that we can actually use it and teach it, which is what an educational institution is about?SANCHEZ: Given the history of that school and the trajectory of what's happening at that school, I don't believe that they would be able to do that.AK: So, tell me, the school will actually be able to paint over these huge murals, but they won't be able to put up plaques contextualizing it.SANCHEZ: I don't believe that they would, no.AK: And why is that?SANCHEZ: Well, they've had how many decades to do that?AK: But is that a reason to destroy something then?SANCHEZ: I don't believe that the school has the wherewithal or the gumption to move in that direction, to use that piece of art as an educational tool.AK: It boggles the mind why the school board refuses to explain these murals, an initiative that would cost mere pennies compared to the three quarters of a million dollars needed to paint over the artwork. Why can’t these public school officials find a creative solution that simultaneously preserves the art, acknowledges hurt feelings and uses these murals as educational tools? I find myself wondering, is this controversy a symptom of something larger that plagues our society? Are our core values so fundamentally divergent that our differences can no longer be bridged?It’s easy to remove works of art when people are offended by them. At times, it can even feel like the humane thing to do. But we must ask ourselves: How does erasing depictions of our history truly help us?CRUMPLER: To me, to destroy Arnautoff's mural would be to destroy truth.AK: We still don’t know how this particular controversy will ultimately play out. The alumni association has a lawsuit pending to preserve these murals. What we do know is that there are countless other works of art, many in public places, awaiting their own public outcry. Once more, Dewey Crumpler.CRUMPLER: Censorship and cancel culture is all around us. That's why art has to be free to do its work, even though it can make individuals very upset and angry. It's a worthy subject that an inanimate object can actually do something to a human being, can make a human being think, can make a human being angry. But the point is you have to work your way through it. Working your way through it is the point of life itself.AK: Who gets a voice in the telling of a story and who gets left out? Why do certain words, ideas and even people get canceled? What does the use of such strategies to silence tell us about our times and our society? These are the issues we’ll be exploring throughout this year on Banished.If you’d like to see photographs of the “Life of Washington” murals and Dewey Crumpler’s response murals, visit our website BooksmartStudios.org. And if you’d like to hear more of our conversation with Dewey Crumpler and other exclusive content, please consider becoming a paying subscriber to Booksmart Studios.I’d like to thank Lope Yap and Peta Cooper for all their help with today’s episode. Banished is produced by Matthew Schwartz and Mike Vuolo. N’Dinga Gaba and Chris Mandra mixed the audio. If you have any thoughts about today’s episode, please leave us a comment at BooksmartStudios.org.This is Banished. I’m Amna Khalid. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit banished.substack.com/subscribe

THE MURALS is a play dramatizing the ongoing conflict over the George Washington High School murals painted by WPA artist Victor Arnautoff in 1936. The play premieres online at the LaborFest Saturday, July 17 – click here for free tickets – and LHT producer Patrick Dixon chats with playwright Howard Pflanzer about the debate and the issues. The Meany Labor Archive's Alan Wierdak and Mieko Palazzo explore the Fascinating and Complicated Legacy of Bayard Rustin.   And on this week's Labor History in 2:00… The year was 1968. That was the day that the American Indian Movement began at a meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Produced by Chris Garlock; editing by Patrick Dixon. To contribute a labor history item, email laborhistorytoday@gmail.com Labor History Today is produced by the Metro Washington Council's Union City Radio and the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University. #LaborRadioPod #History #WorkingClass #ClassStruggle @GeorgetownKILWP #LaborHistory @UMDMLA @ILLaborHistory @sf_laborfest

On this week’s show: The R.J. Phillips Band’s "Nat Turner"; Gene Bruskin discusses his new musical play, “The Moment Was Now,” which takes place in post-civil war Baltimore in 1869, when “America almost did the right thing.” Plus an update on the fate of the Victor Arnautoff murals. Questions, comments or suggestions welcome, and to find out how you can be a part of Labor History Today, email us at LaborHistoryToday@gmail.com Labor History Today is produced by Union City Radio and the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor. Produced & engineered by Chris Garlock.

Eduardo and Andy debate what should be the fate of the George Washington HS mural that SFUSD Board of Education voted to be removed last week. Correction: Andy says Victor Arnautoff’s painting on Coit Tower is “City Lights” but its actually called “City Life” Relevant previous "What's Left?" episodes Identity Politics The Plight, Problems and Promise of Public Education Additional Links: Debate on Washington HS mural Rite of Spring Ballet - Pina Bausch (Opening) Tibetan sand painting What’s Left? Website: Podcasts: iTunes: stitcher: Googleplaymusic:

On this week’s show: Robert Cherny on Victor Arnautoff, the Russian-born artist who reigned as San Francisco's leading mural painter during the New Deal era. The San Francisco Board of Education voted this week to paint over one of his most famous murals. (Click here to sign the petition to save the mural: https://www.change.org/p/san-francisco-board-of-education-prevent-the-removal-of-victor-arnautoff-s-mural-from-george-washington-high-school?cs_tk=AnAxHEYYo0ktAjzyHF0AAXicyyvNyQEABF8BvHQ90GnBhshHppqH0GRmpmI%3D&utm_campaign=4389edb2b31944b6baa35276239bd0f1&utm_medium=email&utm_source=petition_signer_receipt&utm_term=cs) Interviews by Patrick Dixon and Allan Wierdak. Ford Hunger March, Pam Parker, from the jazz opera "Forgotten: The Murder at the Ford Rouge Plant," music and lyrics by Steve Jones. www.forgottenshow.net Questions, comments or suggestions welcome, and to find out how you can be a part of Labor History Today, email us at LaborHistoryToday@gmail.com Labor History Today is produced by Union City Radio and the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor. Produced & engineered by Chris Garlock and Patrick Dixon.

On this week’s show: Robert Cherney on Victor Arnautoff, the Russian-born artist who reigned as San Francisco's leading mural painter during the New Deal era. And on this week’s “Cool things from the George Meany Labor Archives,” Alan, Chloe and Ben explore the AFL-CIO’s long push for national health insurance, with some fascinating documents from the Archives’ pamphlet collection. Interviews by Patrick Dixon and Allan Wierdak. "Ford Hunger March" performed by Pam Parker, from the jazz opera "Forgotten: The Murder at the Ford Rouge Plant," music and lyrics by Steve Jones. www.forgottenshow.net Questions, comments or suggestions welcome, and to find out how you can be a part of Labor History Today, email us at LaborHistoryToday@gmail.com Labor History Today is produced by Union City Radio and the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor. Produced & engineered by Chris Garlock and Patrick Dixon.

Sound Guru Bernie Krause’s Beloved ‘Wild Sanctuary’ Destroyed by Fire Last month's fires in Northern California destroyed thousands of homes and businesses. But we also lost some key cultural landmarks. One of those places was an inspiration to artists, scientists and sound recordists around the world. Yet mostly unknown to its neighbors in Sonoma County's Valley of the Moon. It was home and studio of Kat and Bernie Krause. KQED Science Editor Craig Miller had visited many times before - both as a journalist and friend. After the fire, he returned, to help sort through the rubble - and record this story. Nearly 2,000 Miles From Home, A Prisoner Gets a Visit From His Mom More than a decade ago, then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a state of emergency in our state's prison system. That meant prison officials could do whatever it took to ease the overcrowding, including shipping thousands of inmates to other states. It was supposed to be a temporary solution. But many years later, many California prisoners are still locked up out of state. KCRW's George Lavender follows one mother on a journey to see her son, who's now two thousand miles away. Trans Singer Encounters Mother (and Bathroom Laws) on Tour in the South For more than 40 years, the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus has used its music to help create community and inspire activism. The chorus recently went on a tour of five southern states. The idea was to support local LGBTQ communities in the South. KQED Arts Reporter Chloe Veltman caught up with them on the tour bus. She tells us about one of the singers and his mom, who hadn't heard him perform since he was living as a little girl. Lost Mural with Covert Political Messages Rediscovered in Post Office Basement You may not have heard of Victor Arnautoff, but he was a Russian artist who painted murals around San Francisco in the 1930s. He started off as an assistant to Diego Rivera and became known for his work on San Francisco's Coit Tower. He also painted three murals inside California post offices, including one in the Bay Area city of Richmond. But as Eli Wirtshafter tells us, that mural disappeared for almost 40 years. Until an amateur sleuth tracked it down. Welcome to Rough and Ready, the Tiny Town That Used to Be a Republic Now for another installment of our new series, A Place Called What?!, about California towns with bizarre and surprising names. Last week we took you to Zzyzx, near Death Valley. And we asked our listeners for their ideas for weird place names. Scott Schlacter of San Jose sent us a note asking how the town of "Rough and Ready" near Grass Valley in Nevada County go its name. So KQED's Bianca Taylor called up Jayna Ashcraft, who lives in Rough and Ready. She says her small gold mining town has a big history: in 1850, it seceded from the nation, and temporarily became its own republic.

Best remembered today for his work as a muralist, the Russian-American artist Victor Arnautoff lived a life worthy of Hollywood. In Victor Arnautoff and the Politics of Art (University of Illinois Press, 2017), Robert Cherny details the both range of Arnautoff’s activities and how the views born of those experiences influenced his work. Born in Russia, Arnautoff’s service as a cavalry officer for the anticommunist White forces in the Russian Civil War forced him to abandon his homeland for an involuntary exile, first in China, then in the United States. Long interested in a career as an artist, his studies of art in San Francisco during the 1920s led to a two-year period working for the famous Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. Returning to San Francisco during the depth of the Great Depression, Arnautoff quickly emerged as one of the greatest talents on the regional art scene, with works that championed the working man and criticized the brutalities of capitalism. Arnautoff’s embrace of Communism by the end of the 1930s and his association with Soviet consular officials both during and after World War II brought increasing attention from the U.S. government during the postwar “Red Scare” era, with their monitoring of his activities ending only with his return to the Soviet Union in 1957. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Best remembered today for his work as a muralist, the Russian-American artist Victor Arnautoff lived a life worthy of Hollywood. In Victor Arnautoff and the Politics of Art (University of Illinois Press, 2017), Robert Cherny details the both range of Arnautoff’s activities and how the views born of those experiences... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Best remembered today for his work as a muralist, the Russian-American artist Victor Arnautoff lived a life worthy of Hollywood. In Victor Arnautoff and the Politics of Art (University of Illinois Press, 2017), Robert Cherny details the both range of Arnautoff’s activities and how the views born of those experiences influenced his work. Born in Russia, Arnautoff’s service as a cavalry officer for the anticommunist White forces in the Russian Civil War forced him to abandon his homeland for an involuntary exile, first in China, then in the United States. Long interested in a career as an artist, his studies of art in San Francisco during the 1920s led to a two-year period working for the famous Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. Returning to San Francisco during the depth of the Great Depression, Arnautoff quickly emerged as one of the greatest talents on the regional art scene, with works that championed the working man and criticized the brutalities of capitalism. Arnautoff’s embrace of Communism by the end of the 1930s and his association with Soviet consular officials both during and after World War II brought increasing attention from the U.S. government during the postwar “Red Scare” era, with their monitoring of his activities ending only with his return to the Soviet Union in 1957. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Best remembered today for his work as a muralist, the Russian-American artist Victor Arnautoff lived a life worthy of Hollywood. In Victor Arnautoff and the Politics of Art (University of Illinois Press, 2017), Robert Cherny details the both range of Arnautoff’s activities and how the views born of those experiences influenced his work. Born in Russia, Arnautoff’s service as a cavalry officer for the anticommunist White forces in the Russian Civil War forced him to abandon his homeland for an involuntary exile, first in China, then in the United States. Long interested in a career as an artist, his studies of art in San Francisco during the 1920s led to a two-year period working for the famous Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. Returning to San Francisco during the depth of the Great Depression, Arnautoff quickly emerged as one of the greatest talents on the regional art scene, with works that championed the working man and criticized the brutalities of capitalism. Arnautoff’s embrace of Communism by the end of the 1930s and his association with Soviet consular officials both during and after World War II brought increasing attention from the U.S. government during the postwar “Red Scare” era, with their monitoring of his activities ending only with his return to the Soviet Union in 1957. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Best remembered today for his work as a muralist, the Russian-American artist Victor Arnautoff lived a life worthy of Hollywood. In Victor Arnautoff and the Politics of Art (University of Illinois Press, 2017), Robert Cherny details the both range of Arnautoff’s activities and how the views born of those experiences influenced his work. Born in Russia, Arnautoff’s service as a cavalry officer for the anticommunist White forces in the Russian Civil War forced him to abandon his homeland for an involuntary exile, first in China, then in the United States. Long interested in a career as an artist, his studies of art in San Francisco during the 1920s led to a two-year period working for the famous Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. Returning to San Francisco during the depth of the Great Depression, Arnautoff quickly emerged as one of the greatest talents on the regional art scene, with works that championed the working man and criticized the brutalities of capitalism. Arnautoff’s embrace of Communism by the end of the 1930s and his association with Soviet consular officials both during and after World War II brought increasing attention from the U.S. government during the postwar “Red Scare” era, with their monitoring of his activities ending only with his return to the Soviet Union in 1957. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Best remembered today for his work as a muralist, the Russian-American artist Victor Arnautoff lived a life worthy of Hollywood. In Victor Arnautoff and the Politics of Art (University of Illinois Press, 2017), Robert Cherny details the both range of Arnautoff’s activities and how the views born of those experiences influenced his work. Born in Russia, Arnautoff’s service as a cavalry officer for the anticommunist White forces in the Russian Civil War forced him to abandon his homeland for an involuntary exile, first in China, then in the United States. Long interested in a career as an artist, his studies of art in San Francisco during the 1920s led to a two-year period working for the famous Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. Returning to San Francisco during the depth of the Great Depression, Arnautoff quickly emerged as one of the greatest talents on the regional art scene, with works that championed the working man and criticized the brutalities of capitalism. Arnautoff’s embrace of Communism by the end of the 1930s and his association with Soviet consular officials both during and after World War II brought increasing attention from the U.S. government during the postwar “Red Scare” era, with their monitoring of his activities ending only with his return to the Soviet Union in 1957. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

(January 10, 2013) This talk explores, through Arnautoff's fascinating story, a little known aspect of Stanford's history, and how the University handled the volatile situation.