In March, Gov. Paul LePage of Maine had a mural removed from the state’s Labor Department building. The work, commissioned for $60,000 and installed in 2008, depicts strikes, child labor and the first Labor Day, as well as Rosie the Riveter and Frances Perkins, FDR’s labor secretary. (Both were Maine natives.) According to news reports, the tea-party-backed Republican governor compared these images to North Korean propaganda.
The mural, painted by Maine artist Judy Taylor, remains sequestered in a state government warehouse. But almost-full-size reproductions of its 11 panels are on display in “Celebrate Labor: Where Art and Politics Meet,” an exhibition at VisArts Rockville’s Kaplan Gallery. The show also includes some original Taylor paintings and sketches, and a facsimile of Michael Spafford’s “Twelve Labors of Hercules,” a two-panel 1981 work rebuffed by the state government that commissioned it. (Evicted from the House chamber in Olympia, Wash., it found a permanent home at Centralia College, where a theater was constructed to mimic its intended setting.)
As its title indicates, the show is meant to bolster both labor and Taylor. Curator Nancy Nesvet, who teaches at the Maine College of Art, writes that she and the people who helped reproduce the murals and organize the exhibition constitute “a union of voices that calls for the murals to take their rightful place on public view.” There probably won’t be much support for LePage’s action when Taylor discusses her project (Saturday at 3 p.m.) or at a panel discussion on the controversy (Thursday at 7 p.m.).
Whether the mural has a “rightful” place in a Maine public building will be determined in court over a lawsuit arguing that LePage violated the First Amendment rights of visual artists. But it’s LePage’s outlook, not Taylor’s, that is closer to the North Korean mind-set. The events depicted in the murals verifiably happened and can’t be expunged from the record to suit political taste. (That would be true even in the unlikely circumstance that most Americans considered Frances Perkins or Rosie the Riveter to be symbols of totalitarianism.) And the artist presents Maine’s labor history gently, even blandly. There are no devil-horned plutocrats or bloody-cudgeled strikebreakers.
New public artworks are regularly denounced, more often for aesthetic (or fiscal) than political reasons. Taylor’s mural is a rare example of recent government-funded art whose content is preeminent. It’s painted in a flat, functional style that’s intentionally unshowy. Each panel portrays a few figures in the foreground, rendered in muted colors; the backgrounds, often collaged, are in black, gray and white. The technique evokes the streamlined realism of the 1930s, a period when the labor movement was much more vigorous than it is today.
Generally, museums and galleries hang copies of paintings in the gift shop, not in their main display areas. But the labor mural seems well suited to reproduction; its plain compositions, black-outlined figures and simple blocks of color are in the tradition of poster, magazine and postage-stamp illustration. Taylor’s canvases of Maine’s working harbors, several of which are included here, are more colorful and (slightly) looser. The artist clearly gave more thought to the appearance of the labor mural than the governor did to its removal.
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