From the Living New Deal website:
New Deal Agency:
Federal Arts Project (FAP)
Site Survival:
No Longer Extant
Description:
One of the few New Deal-funded tapestries decorated the library at Piedmont High School for decades, but has now disappeared. “The Muses” comprised two panels, each about 12′ long by 8′ high. They were designed by David Park, an important artist in the Bay Area figurative movement, and woven by Jean Fry and Maya. The WPA’s Federal Art Project (FAP) commissioned these works.
The tapestries were seen and photographed in 2008. Information on their current whereabouts would be appreciated!
David Park 1911, Boston, Massachusetts - 1960, Berkeley, Bay Area. He was decisively influenced the course of Bay Area art in his day by initiating a historic new direction in painting. The Bay Area Figurative movement is now considered the area's most singular contribution to 20th-century American art.
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 (now the San Francisco Art Institute) 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.
For him, painting representationally made for "much more troublesome pictures." 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. Artist Robert Bechtle, recalling that mid-1950s moment in San Francisco, said: "Most of the artists were very committed to abstraction at that point. Figurative work looked shockingly avant-garde."
The late 1950s were extremely productive for Park. At the height of his national success, however, he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He continued working until his death a few months later.
Jean Bradford Fay was born in Seattle on April 22, 1904. While a resident of San Francisco in the 1930s and 1940s, Fay studied at the California School of Fine Arts and with Lyonel Feininger at Mills College in Oakland. For the Federal Art Project, she wove David Park's design into a tapestry for the auditorium curtain at Piedmont (California) High School. She died in Seattle in October 1986.
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