The Michigan Post Office Murals Project grew out of my dissertation research on New Deal murals in the American West and Midwest. When I arrived at the University of Michigan as a postdoctoral fellow in the fall of 2020, I began learning about the approximately forty-seven Section of Fine Arts-funded murals and sculptures across Michigan. These artworks cover the state from the Upper Peninsula to Detroit. The aim of this website was to begin to understand a few of these sites in greater depth. With site photographs collected by team members and research in the Section of Fine Arts archive at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, we were able to complete in-depth pages on five murals in Lower Michigan: Alma, Chelsea, Grand Ledge, Paw Paw, and Plymouth. While these sites only form a fraction of the Section art in Michigan, they are also representative of many prominent themes including history, transportation, agriculture, and the postal service. Each mural page features four short essays on the artist, the process of creating the mural, the mural itself, and the location. For those interested in exploring Michigan’s rich New Deal mural history further, an interactive map catalogs all forty-seven sites, while a series of three contextual essays provide background on the Section of Fine Arts, Post Office architecture, and Michigan mural history.
Michaela Rife (Michigan Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Fellow, 2020-2023)
