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Parker Field

Parker Field is a Brooklyn-based art historian and writer, currently the Managing Director of the Arshile Gorky Foundation.

An Incomplete History of Muralism at Rikers Island

By Parker Field

The artworks I discuss in this article are, for the most part, unseen. They are either unrealized, destroyed, lost, or on display in a place that is geographically, administratively and, largely, psychically removed from New York City’s mainstream society—Rikers Island

Figure 1: Installation view of <em>Man's Daily Bread</em> by Harold Lehman, Mess Hall, Rikers Island Penitentiary. Photograph by Shalat, January 20, 1941. (Mural destroyed in 1962). Collection of the Public Design Commission of the City of New York. For the 1939 New York World's Fair, the American Arts Today pavilion commissioned Lehman to create replicas of two details from his Rikers project. One of the details is modeled after the figure in the lower right corner. <em>The Driller</em>, 1937, is in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and is currently on loan to the Whitney Museum of American Art for the exhibition, <em>Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925-1945.</em>
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MAY 2023

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