CONVERSATION
The George Washington High School mural “Life of Washington” is once again a national story.
As The Frisc wrote on April 5, some students and community members want it destroyed because it depicts slaves on George Washington’s plantation and violence and treachery visited upon Native Americans by whites, with Washington himself complicit. Painted by Russian-born artist Victor Arnautoff in 1936, the mural was meant as a critique from the left, a comment upon the hypocrisy of American myth-making. (There is pointedly no reference in any of the mural’s 13 panels to Washington chopping down the cherry tree.)
Modern critics don’t care about Arnautoff’s intentions. They want the mural painted over.
Now a professor at the San Francisco Art Institute, Dewey Crumpler is a big part of the story too. His life’s work extends into video and sculpture, but murals were his first love. In San Francisco, where he grew up, these works are a great urban tradition that blends public art, people’s history, vivid color, and politics. In the late 1960s, with the “Life of Washington” mural under fire, particularly from African-American students, Crumpler, then in his early 20s, was tapped to create new murals in response. His paintings, a triptych called “Multi-Ethnic Heritage,” are still at the high school.
The Frisc reached out to Crumpler for his views on the controversy and more. Spoiler alert: He wants Arnautoff’s work to stay.
We met last week at the Art Institute, in a high-ceilinged room filled with natural light and drafting tables, as students filtered in and out to prepare for Crumpler’s afternoon class. We talked about his early years as an artist, his hometown’s complicated relationship to art, and his involvement in the mural debate 50 years ago through a connection with the Black Panthers. Crumpler began by talking about a critical view of American history that led to Arnautoff in 1936 painting the walls of the then-new Washington High, fresco-style.
The conversation has been edited and condensed.
Dewey Crumpler: The problem Thomas Jefferson left us is a document that speaks to one extraordinary thought: human liberty. Human liberty is a real revolutionary act that says human beings, by virtue of having been born to occupy space, should be free. That is extraordinary, a radical notion.
They wouldn’t have gotten there without Newton destabilizing the heavens. But they got there through the French. They were Francophiles and Anglophiles and brought those cultures with them and what they considered “the best” ideas, and they tried to elaborate on them. Problem was, they were also connected to a kind of psychotic expression. A tremendous dichotomy—on one hand expressing revolutionary ideas, and on the other responding to a psychosis which had been developed over hundreds of years.
The Frisc: By psychosis, do you mean the way that they dehumanized the existence of certain people?
I mean on one hand, “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men” — at that time — “are created equal” and endowed with certain inalienable rights that come from God. [But] it also means I am a human being and I designate who is not a human being and I use God’s authority to do that — like the kings I rebelled against in England — and I say, this is a human being who should have liberty and this is not. And it’s on that basis that I create a country. George Washington and the rest left a country to grapple with that madness.
‘The work is first and then the politics.’
Human beings are complicated; you can be genius and sick at the same time. You can hold two thoughts at the very same moment. You have to understand and teach the complications of these extraordinary realities, so that the contradiction isn’t covered up as it has been for the 200-plus years the country has been in place.
It was Arnautoff’s understanding of that contradiction, and his political training and his belief system that made it too glaring not to incorporate it in his work. He also studied with communists in Mexico. He had learned his craft by checking out Diego Rivera, who was absolutely not a colonialist. Arnautoff was part of that brigade of knowledge seekers and artists, black artists and white artists, who went to Mexico to check that out. That’s where the power center of the intellectual rigor of the creative arts was centered.
When Arnautoff accepted the responsibility [of creating the Life of Washington mural], no one admitted the relationship of slavery to the founding father. There was a mythos around him being an honest person.
When you were growing up in SF, what was your relationship to art and to public art?
First of all, I was a student in this room we’re in right now, at a table back here at 19 years old. When I first came here, I was so paranoid about the freewheeling wildness of the Art Institute I said I can’t learn here. It was absolutely crazy. This room would have been blasting with the Jefferson Airplane and Grateful Dead, there would have been marijuana all over, and naked people in the fountain out there. I came here and said “Oh, hell no.” I wanted to learn how to draw so well.
In school we never knew anything about black artists. When you asked a professor they said there aren’t any: “Art is about greatness and there are no great black artists.”
I’ve never been overly concerned with politics. The work is first and then the politics. But a teacher of mine then showed me Diego Rivera and [David Alfaro] Siqueiros and [José Clemente] Orozco and said you need to go to Mexico. I’d seen Rivera’s work in various places in the U.S., like here at the Art Institute and City College.
I was starting to show my work around the city, and I was written about in the newspaper a lot. Smokey Robinson bought a painting I did in high school; we were on Melvin Belli’s community-focused TV show on Channel 5 together, and Smokey heard me talking about it. He was in town playing at Bimbo’s.
The students from the Black Panther Party knew who I was, and I was in the same organization of African-American artists as Emory Douglas. [Douglas was Revolutionary Artist and Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party.] I came back to the Arts Institute in 1968 because here art was first, not commercialism. I couldn’t get the energy, creativity, and freedom out of my mind. That’s when the controversy at Washington started to kick up, and I went to talk to the students who were demanding to have the Arnautoff murals removed.
So you came to the Washington situation having formed your own ideas of the relationship between art and politics?
When the students said they were going to destroy the murals and the Board of Education said “No such thing, these are historic,” the students threw ink on the murals. They’re frescoes so the ink soaked into the wall. They could bleach out some of it, but it’s still there.
Once the students did that, the board said OK, we will contract a professional to do [murals in response] through the Arts Commission. Ruth Asawa was on the commission and said a student or children should do the mural, somewhere outside. The Black Panthers said no, we want professional artists to do it and match what’s out there [in Arnautoff’s mural].
The commission said, OK, we’ll do national search. The students said no, uh-uh, because that means you’ll just get a white artist. The Arts Commission said I didn’t have any experience, I was too young. And I’d done a mural for the Arts Commission for a community health center on Silver Avenue when I was in high school! They funded it. It was destroyed along with the building about 15 years ago.
I was a community artist. That means doing stuff in the community.
And it meant, ‘Keep it in your community’ …
Right. San Francisco at this time wouldn’t let a black person live in certain neighborhoods. Willie Mays bought a house and they went crazy and started picketing. He was the greatest sports figure in the world, and they wouldn’t let him live in certain neighborhoods. So for them to give a black person a commission, when teachers already said there are no black artists worth nothing …
But the students wouldn’t have anybody else. So the commission called. I gave them a price, and they said we’d never pay that much to a person who’s not a professional artist.
How much did you ask for?
A pittance, but for that time … They wanted to save the murals, period. So they eventually paid me what I requested. But to show them I wasn’t nonprofessional, I went to Mexico to study murals.
EJ Montgomery, the founder of this local organization of African-American artists, said I’ll turn you on to some Mexican artists. She called up a black expatriate, Elizabeth Catlett, who’s super important, an American artist who had to leave because the racism was so thick and McCarthy was putting anyone with a relationship to communism in prison.
When I got to the Mexico City airport, I didn’t know where I was, I was just a stupid kid who took an airplane. They said get a hotel at the airport. Lord have mercy! I had to stay there at night, with lizards was all over, iguana-looking lizards, and I said oh Lord, I don’t even know where to go. I called Elizabeth, who said I’m going to send a cab. You get in that cab and don’t pay them any money.
It was Elizabeth who turned me on to the muralists. Siqueiros was working on a huge mural in a hotel, the “March of Humanity.” I went there with my portfolio that I’d lugged through the bus stations all the way to Insurgentes Boulevard, and I stayed outside waiting for him. A guard took pity on me and let me in. I laid my stuff out for Siqueiros and mentioned Elizabeth and Pablo O’Higgins, whom I had dinner with the night before, and he immediately opened up.
As as soon as he saw the drawings of what I wanted to do at Washington, he said: What does this have to do with the architecture? How do people come to this mural, how do they see it? From what direction? What’s the first thing they see when they come into the building, and how do they move around the building?
‘Orozco’s murals were so great, I don’t even know how you pick up a brush after standing in front of them.’
He said muralism isn’t about making a big painting. It’s about how human beings interact with this larger-than-life thing. I didn’t quite understand everything, but I remember every word.
People argue now that it’s not appropriate to have these images in a high school.
That’s ridiculous. They said the same thing 50 years ago. Once they hired me the students started talking about taking the Arnautoff mural down. I said you can’t. This got so crazy it took six years to happen, from the protests to the time I finished. It was 1974 when the dedication happened.
We had hundreds of meetings over the years. First they said I couldn’t paint Indians, then I couldn’t paint Asians. First it was only going to be a mural about African Americans, but I and a couple Panthers said it needs to encompass all Third World people.
Before I went to Mexico I was only concerned with the front wall. After I dealt with Siqueiros and O’Higgins, I knew a structure had to be developed to draw you into the totality of the ideas. So the first thing you see when you come out of Arnautoff’s murals is my mural on Latin Americans and Native Americans. And then you turn around and look at the black mural, then down the hallway there’s the edge of the Asian-American mural. Together they make one thing.
I learned more from them, even with Siqueiros in a brief few hours, than I’d learned in my entire time in education. The clarity and the power. Siqueiros had me look at murals around Mexico. He told me to go see Orozco’s work. I was messed up, totally blown out. These murals were so great, I don’t even know how you pick up a brush after standing in front of them.
It’s now nearly 50 years later. Did the Reflection and Action group that voted to remove the murals ask for your input this time around?
No, I wouldn’t go to talk unless the Native American students asked me to talk. The school district has to work it out like they did before. I can see how the image of the dead Native American on the ground would be very difficult for a young person in today’s contentious environment, having trouble reconciling with art.
But that mural should remain, and their role is to deal with the students’ concerns. It might take a 21st-century kiosk or a screen that tells the story, to help that mural become a tool for teaching.
Students today have different readings of metaphors than did we in the previous century. Freedom of speech and art were linked as markers of progress and enlightenment. I think the lack of arts education in the schools has contributed to this lack of understanding. If you whitewash that mural, it will only bleed in history more powerfully than it bleeds right now.
Is there a difference now in SF in how we relate to each other through public art?
That’s a progress question. Just like there are many roads to the historical truth, there are many kinds of so-called progress. I think San Francisco is a complicated space. It has grappled with complications in ways many other cultures, states, or cities don’t have the resources to remedy. Its beauty is so captivating that it assists in obscuring a lot of problems. They look like they’ve been dealt with, but in fact they’ve been obfuscated by the beauty.
Can art help bridge social gaps in a place where many artists can no longer afford to live?
Art reveals those tensions. Artists are being driven out of San Francisco to places where energy can happen. Over time, the place they’re being driven out of is going to be as uninteresting as the place that the people who came to it were leaving. All they’ve done is turn into an image of a dog chasing its tail. You have to be willing to accept creativity and pay for it even though it makes you uncomfortable, or you become a fixed entity that no one remembers except for its beauty, for its topography — whether you’re there or not. This topography will reshape itself because of the nature of its instability. The constant earth quaking. It’s creating a new dynamic context.
Alex Lash is editor in chief of The Frisc.
