For 84 years, San Francisco high school students have walked to class past the scenes of black slaves picking cotton and white settlers urged on by George Washington stepping over a dead American Indian.
To some, the historic mural on a wall at George Washington High is offensive and especially inappropriate for children — so much so that it should be destroyed. But others see an important piece laden with subversive commentary, reminding viewers of the first president’s role in slavery and the death of American Indians during westward expansion.
Over the years, calls to remove the controversial work, “Life of Washington” by Victor Arnautoff, have failed. Yet a renewed effort has momentum, winning the backing of many students, the Board of Education president and a community task force that has called on the district to cover the Depression-era art with white paint.
They will face a vocal art community aligned with the school’s alumni organization, whose members have pledged to defend the 1,600-square-foot fresco, saying efforts to destroy or remove it amount to censorship and a whitewashing of history in a city that ought to be much more sophisticated. They promise to sue if necessary.
“I think the images are really harmful,” said school board President Stevon Cook. “But I do understand the sensitivity about it being art. It’s a difficult position to be in.”
Difficult or not, the mural needs to go, he said — either moved, if financially and logistically possible, or painted over. He’s urging the superintendent to report back on costs and options by the end of the school year in May so the board can take a final vote.
While art often stirs strong feelings, some opponents of the mural, including students, say there’s a difference between a display on a museum wall and one in a public school foyer. Junior Briana King, 16, said last week that the images on the mural are hurtful, are “shoved” in students’ faces and can’t be avoided.
“It’s rude and disrespectful to people’s cultures,” King said.
Senior Emily Leung, 17, agreed, saying the murals depict Washington harming American Indians and African Americans, something she doesn’t want to see every day. Briana and Emily both said the art should be replaced by something more inclusive and uplifting.
“I have no idea what, but I want something with no racism,” Leung said.
Other students, though, said the images served a teaching purpose at the school. “I think it’s there to remind us what happened in the past,” said sophomore Amy Zheng, 15.
The controversy comes amid a broad reckoning of U.S. history’s injustices with modern social mores. Monuments to Confederate leaders, slave owners and white supremacists have been removed. Street and building names have been changed. In Marin County, some residents are fighting — unsuccessfully, so far — to change the name of the Dixie School District, saying the name is a symbol of the pro-slavery South and an affront to African Americans.
But the tension at George Washington High is different, mural supporters say. This isn’t an honorific monument, but rather a historic mural by a renowned artist and, like all art, subject to interpretation and context. Art, even if offensive, represents a place, a time and an artist’s commentary on the world.
“To simply erase it would be the opposite of what art should be about,” said Jon Golinger, who has helped preserve similar murals by Arnautoff in Coit Tower. “History is not something we can whitewash, especially if an artist is trying to remind us that things are not always perfect. The notion that the way to handle uncomfortable information in a school is to burn a book or whitewash a mural is to teach our kids the wrong message.”
It was 1936 when the Works Progress Administration commissioned Arnautoff, a Russian artist, to paint the the Washington mural in the newly built school in the city’s Richmond neighborhood. It was one of many pieces of public art created in San Francisco as part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal employment projects.
Arnautoff painted the Washington scenes directly on wet plaster and in the social realist style of his mentor, Mexican artist Diego Rivera. At the time, “Life of Washington” was considered something of a subversive work, illustrating enslavement and slaughter, Golinger said.
Arnautoff would later teach art at Stanford, where he survived calls to fire him in 1955 for a satirical caricature of Vice President Richard Nixon called “Dix McSmear,” which associated Nixon with McCarthyism and prompted Arnautoff’s interrogation by the House Un-American Activities Committee. A longtime member of the Communist Party, he returned to the Soviet Union in the mid-1960s and died in Leningrad in 1979.
Where to find Arnautoff’s work
Russian Victor Arnautoff was among the artists commissioned by the Works Progress Administration to create public art under President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Five murals are on display in and around the Bay Area.
“City Life”: Arnautoff painted city life scenes on the interior walls of San Francisco’s Coit Tower, depicting passersby, newsstands and crime on city streets. Visitors can view the mural on the ground floor at 1 Telegraph Hill.
“Life of Washington”:The fresco on the life of the first president adorns the walls of George Washington High School in San Francisco’s Richmond District. The works are positioned just inside the school entrance at 600 32nd Ave. Those wishing to see it can email firstname.lastname@example.org for public viewing times.
“Peacetime Activities of the Army”: The Interfaith Center at the Presidio in San Francisco is home to another Arnautoff mural, which shows historical and religious figures and peacetime activities of the Army, according to the center’s website. To see the fresco, visitors can attend a two-hour Sunday open house tour at 130 Fisher Loop.
“Lovers’ Point”:Those dropping off mail at the post office in Pacific Grove (Monterey County) can observe Arnautoff’s beach mural of Lover’s Point State Park. The mural is in the lobby at 680 Lighthouse Ave.
“South San Francisco, Past and Present”: Arnautoff’s work is also on display at a post office in South San Francisco, where he painted the city’s history on the wall at 322 Linden Ave.
Several of his public murals raised eyebrows or hackles when unveiled, including one painted in 1932 in Palo Alto celebrating medical advancements that included a doctor examining a bare-breasted female patient. A Coit Tower mural shows a newspaper rack containing a Marxist journal and a Communist Party publication, but not what was considered at the time the conservative San Francisco Chronicle.
“As I see it, the artist is a critic of society,” Arnautoff told The Chronicle in 1935.
The George Washington mural was described upon its completion as “one of the major masterpieces of fresco on this coast,” according to a Chronicle review. Three decades later, just months after the 1967 Summer of Love, a group of students at the high school called on administrators to destroy or alter the images of slavery. “Black power clashes with art,” one headline read.
“The blacks did more than just pick cotton,” Roosevelt Thomas, the president of the Black Student Union, said at the time. “During the Revolution, more than 5,000 blacks fought for this nation’s independence.”
In response to the controversy, artist Dewey Crumpler, who is black, was hired to paint additional works at the school, “compromise murals” depicting Latinos, Native Americans, Asian Americans and African Americans overcoming oppression. Yet resentment and outrage has remained, said Lateefah Simon, who graduated from the school in 1995.
“I always have deep thoughts about that damn mural,” said Simon, now a member of the BART Board of Directors. “Every single day I walked up those steps as a black girl, it was pretty clear I was looking at racist iconography.”
Her daughter also attended the school, confronted by those same images until she graduated in 2012, Simon said. “We shouldn’t be seeing those images outside of textbooks and museums,” she said. “They are not for glory, and they are not for show.”
The recent fight over the mural started intensifying roughly a year ago, with some students, parents and community members pressing the school board to take action. District officials then created a community panel of students, artists and alumni, among others, to publicly discuss the mural and come up with a recommendation to address concerns.
Eight of the group’s 11 members recommended the mural be digitally archived and then painted over, “because the mural does not represent SFUSD values,” said district spokeswoman Gentle Blythe. One member voted against the removal, and two abstained.
“The majority of the group expressed that the main reason to keep the mural up at the school is focused on the legacy of the artist, rather than experience of the students,” Blythe said.
Lope Yap Jr., vice president of the school’s alumni association, was the lone dissenting vote. He said that though he appreciates the passion and the feelings of those offended by the images in the mural, the answer is not to destroy them.
“I can’t imagine trashing art, just like justifying the book-burning in Germany in the ’30s,” Yap said.
He likened the move to blowing up Mount Rushmore because it depicts Washington and Thomas Jefferson, both former slave owners. Yap suggested alternatives, including creating new art with positive images at the school or adding plaques beside “Life of Washington” explaining Arnautoff’s perspective and the purpose of the federally funded installations.
“I honor what Arnautoff tried to do and did do,” Yap said. “He was trying to say this was a dark past of our country.”
District Superintendent Vince Matthews and his staff are reviewing the recommendation and will present options to the school board at a public meeting, Blythe said.
Others possibilities suggested by critics include covering the mural with a tarp or projecting digital images onto it to hide the offensive parts from daily viewing. If the fresco were to be moved, that would probably require removing the walls to preserve the panels. It’s unclear how much that would cost — or who would pay for it.
“With enough resources, technically it could be done,” Golinger said. “It would be quite a feat.”
Yap said any school board vote to destroy the artwork would be met with a lawsuit, perhaps based on California art preservation laws or an argument that the destruction would constitute a waste of taxpayer dollars.
“We would pursue every legal course to prevent this from happening,” Yap said.
City Supervisor Matt Haney, who helped start the current effort to remove the mural from student view, said he opposes painting over it. Still, he believes students should not have to see slavery and a dead American Indian as they go about their school day. Haney has also gone further — proposing to rename the school, given Washington’s past as a slave owner.
“There may have been a certain intention with the art,” he said, “but over the years we’ve heard again and again from people who feel offended by it, hurt by it, and feel less safe and supported in our schools as a result of it.”
Jill Tucker and Gwendolyn Wu are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: email@example.com, firstname.lastname@example.org Twitter: @jilltucker, @gwendolynawu