Back Roads: Feast for the eyes

By Tim King
The Land Correspondent

January 19, 2008 04:00 pm

— “Artists have got to eat just like other people.” That seemingly meaningless statement, made by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s relief administrator Harry Hopkins, had special meaning in Minnesota during the 1930s.
In some places unemployment was more than 70 percent, and starvation was not unheard of. To keep artists fed, and to inspire Minnesotans, the government commissioned artwork in public buildings.
Post offices were logical places to put it.
Across the country the Treasury Department’s Section of Painting and Sculpture commissioned murals and paintings for post office lobbies. In Minnesota, from the mid-1930s to the early 1940s, 26 post offices were graced with art that can still be seen and enjoyed today.
In the Caledonia post office Edmund D. Lewandowski painted the mural “Hog Raising.” The mural, which can be viewed by logging on to www.wpamurals.com/Caledoni.htm, spans the full wall above the postmaster’s office and features three muscular farmers feeding a pen of hogs.
In International Falls, Lucia Wiley painted a mural over the post master’s door depicting logging’s early days. She called the mural “Early Logging at Koochiching Falls,” (www.muralist.org/loggingc.html.) The 12-by-8 International Falls mural was finished in 1937. Wiley also painted “Indians Gathering Wild Rice” in Long Prairie in 1939. That painting is 7 feet high and 15 feet long.
Wiley, like all of the post office artists, was a professional. Wiley was trained in Minneapolis and had a lengthy career. She painted in the true fresco style like Michealangelo and her contemporary Diego Rivera. Like both of those artists, she was occasionally controversial.
In 1947 she painted “Northern Nativity,” (www.muralist.org/nativity.html), for the Ashland, Wis. post office. The postmaster found it objectionable and refused to accept it.
Wiley, Lewandowski and the other post office artists were part of a movement across the United States and Mexico that created some of the 20th century’s most powerful art. Much of that art can be seen today by all people, at no cost, in public places in both countries.
Minnesotans can see the art in post offices at St. Cloud, Sauk Centre, Breckenridge, Cambridge, Chisholm, Cloquet, Ely, Grand Rapids, Hastings, Hutchinson, Litchfield, Morris, Park Rapids, St. James, North St. Paul, White Bear Lake, Wabasha, Wayzata and Windom.

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