Mural to be restored in future C.R. council chambers

CEDAR RAPIDS - Transforming the 78-year-old former federal courthouse here into a new home for city government is taking a fascinating piece of the building back to its first years.

This spring, an overcoat of paint on one wall in the building's historic third-floor courtroom will be painstakingly removed to reveal what was intentionally hidden behind it - a colorful mural painted soon after the building's opening during the Great Depression by a group of less-than-well-known artists working for the federal government's Treasury Relief Art Program funded by the Works Progress Administration.

The old courtroom is to become the new chambers for the City Council, and last week council member Monica Vernon, a strong advocate for the council's move into the room, said she couldn't be happier that the council will make the large, open, former courtroom its new home and that original art in the room is being restored, likely in time to greet the council at its first meeting in the building this summer.

“We need a great room for people to come and be part of our proceedings,” Vernon says. “And this room, it's historic. We're not a courtroom. But we are a place where people gather, where important decisions are made.”

As for the art, she says revealing what is now hidden fits a city government that values openness and encourages public discourse.

Sylvia Rose Augustus, regional historic preservation and fine arts officer for the U.S. General Services Administration in Kansas City, Mo., points out that the WPA-period murals that surround the top portion of all four walls of the 49-foot-by-61-foot former courtroom have been painted over not once, but twice. The now-hidden paintings are 5-feet-4 1/2-a-half inches tall, 8 1/2 feet off the floor above the room's wood paneling.

Covered twice

By one GSA historical account, the mural paintings - which are described as depictions of “Development of the West,” “Community Service,” “Archaeological Research” and “Superstition and Science” - were whitewashed by the federal court in 1954, cleaned and revealed anew in the early 1960s and then painted over again a few years later.

The GSA's Augustus says agency records indicate that the murals lost favor for one of two reasons or both: Some thought the art inferior to other WPA-period work; and some took offense to some of the images, one of which features an Old West lynching or hanging before the arrival of the American court system there.

In one GSA account, the agency states that the murals were first painted over “after almost 20 years of complaints about the murals' graphic images.”

The agency's synopsis further notes that the team of artists that painted the murals was led by Oskaloosa, Iowa-native Francis Robert White, who initially followed prominent artist Grant Wood's style while a student at the Stone City Art Colony in 1932. However, White broke away from Wood to start another artists' collective, a break that may have led to the assessment that the courthouse murals were inferior art ought to be painted over, the GSA synopsis says.

Partial restoration

It was in the process of handing the former federal courthouse over to the city of Cedar Rapids in exchange for the land on which the new federal courthouse is now being built that the thought of restoring the courtroom murals moved ahead.

Augustus says the GSA can't justify restoring all the former courtroom's murals when it no longer owns the building, but she says the federal agency has agreed to tap its funds set aside for art conservation to restore the mural above what had been the judge's bench. She put the costs at about $60,000.

The hope, she adds, is that the initial work will stimulate local funding interest to bring back the art on the other walls in the courtroom.

Arthur Page, chief conservator at Page Conservation Inc., Washington, D.C., will work on the Cedar Rapids courtroom mural with an expected start date in March.

Page says the job involves removing the “overpaint,” consolidating the mural's paint to make sure it's sticking to the wall, “inpainting” any lost paint and applying a final varnish over it. Painting over a mural twice, he adds, is “not an advisable habit.”

Long debate

Page says the debate has been “long and ongoing” over depictions in WPA art about worker issues, justice issues and social-fairness issues as well as socialism, American Indian issues, slavery and lynchings.

It is important to note, he says, that any depiction of a lynching that might be revealed in subsequent restoration work in what is becoming the new Cedar Rapids City Council chambers was painted to make a statement against lynching. “It's there with the idea that justice replaces lynching,” he says.

Mel Andringa, artist and co-founder of Legion Arts in Cedar Rapids, says exposing the courtroom murals will turn the new council chambers into a tourist attraction - which is what the Grant Wood-designed stained-glass window has done for the Veterans Memorial Building in Cedar Rapids where City Hall and the council chambers had been before the 2008 flood.

Andringa says the courthouse murals represent a “concurrent, yet different” point of view from Grant Wood's work. Wood mainly looked back for inspiration, whereas the courtroom murals are “forward-looking, progressive, politically oriented,” he says.