Thursday, November 10, 2022, 6:45 pm PST
The Roxie Cinema, 3117 16th Street, San Francisco "TOWN DESTROYER"
What happens when art no longer reflects current societal views? This is the focus of Town Destroyer, a film about the New Deal muralist Victor Arnautoff’s 1936 work, "The Life of Washington,” a high school mural that became a media firestorm. Some students, parents, and observers found the depictions of slavery and Native American genocide offensive, demanding that the San Francisco School Board remove or destroy the mural. Identity politics gone off the rails—or a justified blow to a lingering American “colonized mentality"? Filmmakers Alan Snitow and Deborah Kaufman feature students, historians, artists, activists—(and the Living New Deal, which strongly opposed censoring the mural.)
The screening on November 10 will be followed by a panel discussion with the filmmakers and special guests. INFORMATION AND TICKETS
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Tuesday, November 15, 2022 5pm-6pm PST (8pm EST) "Painting the Mail: Post Office Art of the New Deal" with Barbara Bernstein The New Deal didn’t just decorate post offices. It celebrated them. Murals, bas reliefs and sculptures depict letters being written, mailed, sorted, transported, delivered, read and shared. These artworks are increasingly imperiled as post offices are sold and repurposed. Barbara Bernstein, the Living New Deal's Public Art Specialist and founder of the New Deal Art Registry, offers a vision for the reuse of these buildings that preserves both the artworks and the sense of community that post offices can provide. Free. REGISTER
Tuesday, November 29, 2022, 5pm PST "TOWN DESTROYER" with filmmakers Deborah Kaufman and Alan Snitow
Victor Arnautoff’s mural, “Life of Washington,” has been debated for decades. Denounced as racist by some, others see it as a critique of America’s founding myths. What is the role of art in reflecting America to itself? Join the conversation. Free. REGISTER
Tuesday, December 6, 2022, 5pm-6pm PST
"Reality Makes Them Dream: Revisiting New Deal-Era Photography" with Josie Johnson and Emilia Mickevicius Photography from the New Deal-era is often associated with mirroring the bleak realities of the Great Depression. Yet, the photography is remarkably varied, using the raw material of the visible world as a point of departure for viewers’ imaginations, venturing into the poetic and surreal. Join us as we examine how the works of WPA photographers like Sybil Anikeef, Sonya Noskowiak, Edward Weston and others complicate and add dimension to understanding art and culture in the US in the 1930s.
Josie Johnson, PhD. is the Capital Group Foundation Curatorial Fellow for Photography at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, where she is currently preparing her exhibition "Reality Makes Them Dream: Photography 1929-1941." Emilia Mickevicius, PhD. is a photography historian and curator in the Photography department of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She has contributed to numerous exhibitions at SFMOMA, including "A Living for Us All: Artists and the WPA" in 2022. Free.REGISTER
The Living New Deal documents the vast legacy the New Deal (1933-1942) left to America
and the spirit of public service that inspired it.
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The Living New Deal
Department of Geography
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720
Tuesday, November 29, 2022, 5pm PST
