For years Lane Technical High School students passed by them on their way to and from history to English, or sat next to them during lunch, without giving them much, if any, thought.
Museum-caliber murals, frescoes, statues and a 40-foot-tall painting–works hung so long ago that no one knew where they came from or who created them–had blended into the background under decades of air pollution and bad paint jobs.
But about 18 months ago, after Principal David Schlichting noticed that one of the three 18-foot-long murals outside the library was peeling away from its frame, the students and faculty began taking an interest in the school’s vast art collection, and decided to raise funds to restore the works and to begin researching their origins.
“What the students and we have found out about these works is a wonderful discovery,” says Schlichting. “Sometimes we take it all for granted. Now we’re starting to really look at it.”
What the school discovered was that most of the pieces were created in the 1930s by Works Progress Administration artists. Murals depicting various U.S. states were originally painted for the 1933 World’s Fair and were on exhibit in the General Motors exhibit hall, where, once a day, a car was built in assembly-line fashion. Each mural, depicting the raw materials available in each state that could be used to create a car, was given to Lane Tech after the fair ended.
Other WPA art in the school includes Edgar Britton’s series of 20-foot high frescoes in the lunchroom titled “Epochs in the History of Man.” One teacher claims a student of hers had eaten by them every day and had not noticed them until the middle of his senior year.
The three murals hanging by the library are the oldest, painted in 1909 by students of the Art Institute. The paintings depict the steel, construction and shipping industries in Chicago, and were a gift to the school when it was still located at Division and Sedgwick.
Flora Doody, a Lane Tech special-education teacher who previously worked at the Art Institute, spearheaded the restoration project, beginning with a call to Barry Bowman, the owner-operator of the Chicago Conservation Center, which specializes in restoring works of art in various mediums.
“Barry came out and looked at everything, and told us that we had all this good stuff,” Schlichting says. “So we wanted to preserve it, and we also wanted the art department and history department to be involved in the research process.”
Bowman created a restoration priority list, beginning with the 1909 murals. The school had no extra funds to begin the process, so Doody applied for and received a state grant that would pay for the initial restoration of two murals, on the condition that a group of instructors teach one of their classes about the history of the paintings. At the end of the year, the students who have been studying the school’s art will get a chance to go to either Bowman’s Conservation Center to see a slide show on the murals’ restoration process, or to the Art Institute to see other paintings from the same era.
Another component to the grant is for students to write a document that will describe each work, its artist and how it came to the school.
Some detective work
“When these things were done, there was little documented history on them, so we need to create something, and that’s what the kids are doing,” Schlichting says. “They are finding some information through research, and some of the information we’ve received by accident.”
The mystery of the origin of the 1909 murals was solved by one of Bowman’s other clients, who saw the paintings at the Conservation Center while checking on his own work.
“His name is Noah Hoffman and his uncle was one of the WPA muralists at Lane Tech, so he has been a big cheerleader for us, and has worked with us,” Doody says. “One day he was in an antique shop and he found a publication dated 1915 from the students of the Art Institute. He read it and inside was a letter from the class president of Lane Tech thanking Kate Buckingham for the paintings given to the school by the Art Institute. The letter described the paintings and where they hung in the original building.”
But the paintings held another surprise. Before Bowman began restoring the third mural, one depicting dock workers, he noticed the signature, which had gone unnoticed hanging nine feet above the floor, and hidden underneath years of dirt.
The artist’s name was William Scott.
“It was a major discovery because Scott is a famous African-American artist,” Bowman says. “And African-American artists around the turn of the century are almost non-existent. I knew of his work because I had just done a Scott picture for the Du Sable Museum.”
Scott’s works are going to be on display at The Indianapolis Museum of Art next year. The Lane Tech mural, now considered the earliest known work by Scott, is too large to travel to the exhibit.
But the Terra Museum in Chicago plans to host the Scott show in the spring of 1996, and may include the mural that has sat anonymously over the school library door for decades.
Ready for the next project
Once the Scott mural is restored, Bowman is prepared to work on whatever piece the school next chooses. Students have rallied around the idea of saving the 40-foot mural of an American Indian, even though none of them have ever seen it.
The Indian, painted on the auditorium’s fire curtain, has been covered for 20 years by a Technicolor canvas that resembles a rainbow wig exploding. To celebrate the United States’ bicentennial, a math teacher worked with students to paint school walls and the fire curtain canvas with brightly colored kaleidoscopic images that have been out of date for years.
Bowman will have to work at the school, first removing the canvas and assessing the damage cause by time and glue, before he can estimate the restoration cost. To raise money for the removal of the canvas, the student council and the National Honor Society sponsored a “Save The Indian” dance attended by more than 700 students, which raised $5,000.
Marjn Siadat, the National Honor Society president, says restoring the fire curtain is important to her, even if she has gone on to college when the work is completed.
“I am graduating this year, and several of us who have been involved are graduating, but it’s important for us to know that we’re the ones who are taking the initiative to start a project,” says the 17-year-old Siadat. “We want to give the opportunity for younger students to continue after us. What we’ve done is just the beginning, just a start. I hope the tradition will continue and there will be a second annual dance next year.”
Student body president Jesus Mata, 18, says the importance of being surrounded by beautiful art hit home when he came across an alumnus from the 1940s and his family trying to get into the auditorium last year.
“This man, who lives in England now with his wife, had come back to the United States and had brought his family to the school to show them the fire curtain,” Mata says. “He looked around and said, `There was something here, but I guess it’s not here anymore. That’s too bad.’
“I told him that it was there, just under . . . that. I sort of feel bad that we won’t have graduates from the ’70s and ’80s coming back to look for the Indian because they didn’t see it when they were here.”
Doody says she hopes that Bowman will be able to remove the fire curtain canvas this summer. The cleaning and restoration will have to be done on-site because the steel fire curtain cannot be removed, and the Indian is painted directly on the steel.
The complete restoration and research project will take several years, Doody says. But a new grant will pay for some future work, and numerous alumni have made donations.
“I hope there is a way we can tie the history behind the artwork with the different classes, whether it’s history or English,” Mata says. “People should know how much work it took to restore all of this art. And what it means to us.”
