When art preservationist Heather Becker placed a call to Tilton Elementary in 1995, she was looking for three lunette murals above the auditorium doors, painted in 1910-’11 by Janet Laura Scott. Becker was researching murals painted in Chicago public schools between the turn of the century and the New Deal, with the eventual aim of restoring them, and Scott’s works at the west-side school–depicting Christopher Columbus, the Pilgrims, and William Penn–were among the oldest Becker had heard about.
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Her boss and partner in research, Barry Bauman, owner of the Chicago Conservation Center in River North, restored the murals and reinstalled them. A year or so after the Tilton visit, Becker and Bauman’s independent undertaking became the Mural Preservation Project, a $1.5 million program funded by the Chicago Board of Education and the Public Building Commission to bring 437 extant school murals back to their former color and glory. Last month Chronicle Books published Becker’s book about their efforts, Art for the People: The Rediscovery and Preservation of Progressive- and WPA-Era Murals in the Chicago Public Schools, 1904-1943.
Becker, who earned a bachelor’s degree from the School of the Art Institute in 1989, became fascinated by the restoration of a chapel fresco while on a painting scholarship in Umbria. “Not that I wanted to be a hands-on conservator,” she says, “but the concept of preserving culture came to the forefront, for me, for the first time.” She got a job as an assistant at the Chicago Conservation Center and in ’93 prepared a marketing plan that helped raise the company’s profile.
In Art for the People, Becker chronicles the project as well as the histories of the murals themselves and of American mural art in general. The 256-page tome includes 250 color photographs as well as more than two dozen essays by historians, educators, artists, and students–Francis V. O’Connor, Studs Terkel, Ed Paschke, and muralist Lucile Ward Robinson, to name a few. “I wanted people to gain an understanding, not only on the local level but also on the national level, of how mural art can be used as a way to cause social change and create environments that are influential in the public eye,” says the author. “Chronicle [Books] picked up on the fact that it not only was a local story about Chicago. It was also about a grassroots project that started out small and struggled through many hurdles to end up being the largest mural preservation project in American history.”
