Scholars urge board to spare controversial school mural

Despite the San Francisco school board’s recent vote to destroy a controversial school mural, the debate over the role of art and history is still raging. More than 400 academics and educators from across the country and around the world signed a petition that they plan to send to the district this week urging it to reconsider the decision.

The reason? Painting over the “Life of Washington” fresco is illogical, according to the petition circulated on nonsite.org, a peerreviewed academic journal focused on politics, history, art history and literature.

The San Francisco Unified School District’s board voted 60 on June 25 to paint over the mural, which features slavery and white settlers stepping over a dead American Indian.

The board, citing the feelings of students who were offended by the images, said that destroying the piece, located in George Washington

High School, would be a form of reparations for historic racial injustices against African Americans and Native Americans.

In fact, petitioners argued, painting over the mural would accomplish the opposite.

“It exposes and denounces in pictorial form the U.S. history of racism and colonialism,” according to the petition. “The only viewers who should feel unsafe before this mural are racists.”

There is no public disagreement over the meaning of the images, said Charles Palermo, editor of nonsite.org and a professor of art history at the College of William & Mary.

It was painted by Russian artist Victor Arnautoff, a communist who was highly critical of America’s history of racism, Palermo said.

The school board “voted to destroy a significant monument of antiracism. This is a gross violation of logic and sense,” according to the petition. “What remains is a mistake in the way we react to historical works of art — ignoring their meaning in favor of our feelings about them — and a mistake in the way we treat historical works of art — using them as tools for managing feelings, rather than as objects of interpretation.”

While people can have different responses to a work of art, that has nothing to do with the meaning of it, Palermo said.

Logically, it would make more sense if an anticommunist wanted to destroy the mural, he added.

“This mural is strongly and very plainly antiracist,” he said.

Palermo said he expects to send the petition to the school board this week, even though supporters continue to add their names.

Board President Stevon Cook, who reviewed the document online, said he was unmoved by the petitioners.

“It’s another case of people trying to tell others how to respond to how their community is represented,” he said. “They should let me get back to my job and, if they’re so moved, they should commission their own murals. I’m focused on the real solutions, not online petitions from people that aren’t stakeholders in our schools.”

The petition included signatures from dozens of academics at universities across the country as well as artists, teachers, politicians and alumni from George Washington High School.

District officials said it will cost at least $600,000 to paint over the mural, a process that includes an environmental impact report. The board’s decision included a caveat that if that process will take too long — say three years — they would rather obscure it with panels to remove the images from public view as soon as possible.

The board’s unanimous vote, with one member absent, followed a recommendation by a community task force appointed by the district to address concerns raised by parents and students about the 1,600squarefoot mural.

The community group recommended covering it with white paint because it said the mural glorifies slavery, genocide, colonization, manifest destiny, white supremacy and oppression — a complete misreading of the image, said Meryl Bailey, a Mills College assistant professor who signed the petition.

“Arnautoff ’s work actually does the opposite,” she said. “I can understand how students might be disturbed by some parts of the mural. However, if we erase all the things that disturb us, we will forget them.”