Autistic Reality
Central Column of Social Programs by Robert Graham in Second Part of Room on Second Term (1937-1941): The New Deal Looking Northeast
Five columns are meant to represent FDR’s New Deal, depicted as rolls of an industrial printing press. The negative images are shown wrapped around the columns and then “imprinted” on the wall to your left as bronze reliefs. The images show different New Deal programs that FDR enacted to help the United States out of the Great Depression. These tactile reliefs are meant to be interactive for the blind and include Braille captions throughout. Unfortunately, many of the Braille captions are illegible due to misplacement high on the sculpture and the incorrect spacing of the dots.
The Detail
A multitude of new deal efforts are further memorialized in this chamber in the form of a thirty-foot-long bronze mural by Robert Graham.
Robert Graham began his study for the Social Programs mural by doing intensive research on the new deal. He chose fifty-four programs to depict and then look for images to graphically symbolize the essence of each. Thus, for example, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) is symbolized by two workers planting a ponderosa pine seedling, and the Farm Security Administration (FSA), by a farmer driving a tractor.
The mural consists of realistic images as well as writing, braille, and a background of the hands and faces of workers. The mural depicts the efforts of many of the innovative programs—the CCC, the WPA, the TVA, the FSA, labor relations, social security—which elevated the country from the quagmire into which it had sunk. These social programs, sometimes called the alphabet programs (because of the acronyms which referred to them), were the New Deal solutions which were developed to enable people to pull themselves up from the depths of despair.
The next step for sculptor Graham was to establish an overall format for the mural that would organize all of the images. Graham used a grade of photographs as a way to study this issue. The result is a matrix based on a twelve-by-twelve-inch grid of squares overlaid on five 6-by-6-foot panels. One panel contains thirty-six 12-inch squares, two panels contain nine 24-inch squares, and two panels contain four 36-inch squares. Within this geometry, the mural allows for a series of variations within an overall order.
Robert Graham
Born in Mexico, Robert Graham came to the United States in 1950 when he was twelve years old. He studied at the San Francisco Art Institute, where the great muralist Diego Rivera had taught.
Since the 1970s, Graham’s sculptures have shifted from beautiful, small, gallery-sized environments the large monument-scale civic works such as the gateway figures at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics and the Duke Ellington Memorial in New York’s Central Park.
Bob works primarily in bronze and has his own foundry where he often casts his pieces with his production team. This workshop approach to the making of art is very reminiscent of Renaissance artists and has allowed him to experiment and explore new materials and casting techniques. Masterful draftsmanship of the human form, innovative casting techniques, and an appreciation of architecture as an art of spaces as well as of forms have allowed Bob Graham to envision his sculptures as part of an expanded public life.
Graham’s murals sympathetically evoke the Works Progress Administration murals of the new deal. The WPA funded highly creative, unemployed artists to work on government buildings. The murals, which often depict workers engaged in their labor, enrich the quality of post office is, libraries, and other civic buildings. Other innovative programs created jobs for writers, photographers, actors, musicians, and dancers. By supporting these individuals, the WPA promoted a remarkable efflorescence of the arts and gave these talented Americans a great sense of useful participation in the country’s recovery.
In addition to the mural itself, Graham devised an innovative method of revealing the casting process and further exploring the images. Five bronze cylinders stand free from the wall and contained the negative images of the five panels on the large wall. A viewer can imagine these cylinder seals rolled on the clay to make the positive images on the murals affixed to the wall. And, as a metaphor, the viewer can imagine the positive, practical results produced by these alphabet agencies.
Central Column of Social Programs by Robert Graham in Second Part of Room on Second Term (1937-1941): The New Deal Looking Northeast
Five columns are meant to represent FDR’s New Deal, depicted as rolls of an industrial printing press. The negative images are shown wrapped around the columns and then “imprinted” on the wall to your left as bronze reliefs. The images show different New Deal programs that FDR enacted to help the United States out of the Great Depression. These tactile reliefs are meant to be interactive for the blind and include Braille captions throughout. Unfortunately, many of the Braille captions are illegible due to misplacement high on the sculpture and the incorrect spacing of the dots.
The Detail
A multitude of new deal efforts are further memorialized in this chamber in the form of a thirty-foot-long bronze mural by Robert Graham.
Robert Graham began his study for the Social Programs mural by doing intensive research on the new deal. He chose fifty-four programs to depict and then look for images to graphically symbolize the essence of each. Thus, for example, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) is symbolized by two workers planting a ponderosa pine seedling, and the Farm Security Administration (FSA), by a farmer driving a tractor.
The mural consists of realistic images as well as writing, braille, and a background of the hands and faces of workers. The mural depicts the efforts of many of the innovative programs—the CCC, the WPA, the TVA, the FSA, labor relations, social security—which elevated the country from the quagmire into which it had sunk. These social programs, sometimes called the alphabet programs (because of the acronyms which referred to them), were the New Deal solutions which were developed to enable people to pull themselves up from the depths of despair.
The next step for sculptor Graham was to establish an overall format for the mural that would organize all of the images. Graham used a grade of photographs as a way to study this issue. The result is a matrix based on a twelve-by-twelve-inch grid of squares overlaid on five 6-by-6-foot panels. One panel contains thirty-six 12-inch squares, two panels contain nine 24-inch squares, and two panels contain four 36-inch squares. Within this geometry, the mural allows for a series of variations within an overall order.
Robert Graham
Born in Mexico, Robert Graham came to the United States in 1950 when he was twelve years old. He studied at the San Francisco Art Institute, where the great muralist Diego Rivera had taught.
Since the 1970s, Graham’s sculptures have shifted from beautiful, small, gallery-sized environments the large monument-scale civic works such as the gateway figures at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics and the Duke Ellington Memorial in New York’s Central Park.
Bob works primarily in bronze and has his own foundry where he often casts his pieces with his production team. This workshop approach to the making of art is very reminiscent of Renaissance artists and has allowed him to experiment and explore new materials and casting techniques. Masterful draftsmanship of the human form, innovative casting techniques, and an appreciation of architecture as an art of spaces as well as of forms have allowed Bob Graham to envision his sculptures as part of an expanded public life.
Graham’s murals sympathetically evoke the Works Progress Administration murals of the new deal. The WPA funded highly creative, unemployed artists to work on government buildings. The murals, which often depict workers engaged in their labor, enrich the quality of post office is, libraries, and other civic buildings. Other innovative programs created jobs for writers, photographers, actors, musicians, and dancers. By supporting these individuals, the WPA promoted a remarkable efflorescence of the arts and gave these talented Americans a great sense of useful participation in the country’s recovery.
In addition to the mural itself, Graham devised an innovative method of revealing the casting process and further exploring the images. Five bronze cylinders stand free from the wall and contained the negative images of the five panels on the large wall. A viewer can imagine these cylinder seals rolled on the clay to make the positive images on the murals affixed to the wall. And, as a metaphor, the viewer can imagine the positive, practical results produced by these alphabet agencies.