John Park WPA Murals

 Posted by on April 20, 2016
Apr 202016
 

John Muir Elementary
380 Webster
Hayes Valley

David Park at John Muir Elementary School

As you enter John Muir Elementary school you are greeted with three lunettes.  In the lunettes are WPA murals by artist David Park.  These murals were done in 1934, the same year that park joined the WPA.  These three are painted in the Socialist Realism style.

John Muir Elementary

The three murals are titled Man in Art, Man in Nature and Man in Industry.  There are very few David Park murals left, making these in the school a San Francisco treasure.

David Park at John Muir Elementary

David Park (1911-1960) was a painter and a pioneer of the Bay Area Figurative School of painting during the 1950s.

Park was part of the post-World War II alumni of the San Francisco Art Institute, called the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA) at the time.

Park moved to Los Angeles in 1928 to attend the Otis Art Institute, his only formal education, but dropped out after less than a year. In 1944 he began teaching at the California School of Fine Arts and adopted the then-dominant mode of abstract expressionist painting. He never felt fully comfortable with this style, however, and in 1949 hauled all his abstract canvases to the Berkeley dump. “Art ought to be a troublesome thing,” he would later declare.

Park became the first of several Bay Area artists, followed by Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bischoff, to reconcile thick paint and vigorous brushstrokes with figurative subjects such as people engaged in contemporary, everyday life.

Park was producing some of his best work by the 1950s and was at the height of his national success, when he was diagnosed with cancer.

He switched to watercolors when he could no longer work in oil and passed away a few months after his diagnosis.

  One Response to “John Park WPA Murals”

  1. Thank you. They are indeed a treasure!
    What happened to Park’s other public works from the WPA era?

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