Michigan Post Office Murals Project

Plymouth: The Artist

Carlos Lopez (1908-1953)

When Carlos Lopez was invited to paint a mural for Paw Paw’s new post office in 1937, he had already completed another mural for the Section–titled The Stage at Dawn–in collaboration with his wife, Rhoda. The mural, which likewise includes a stagecoach as the subject of its main panel and has several smaller panels below with similar scenes, was installed in the Dwight, Illinois post office earlier that year. Living in Royal Oak, Michigan, at the time, Carlos and Rhoda maintained a collaborative art practice in the Detroit area for years. The pair often participated in the Detroit Artists’ Market where they together sold pots, drawings, and paintings.

Carlos maintained an active mural painting practice, fine arts practice, commercial art practice, and teaching career of his own. Immigrating to the United States at eleven years old from Spain, he spent his teenage years in Michigan and soon became a factory worker in the new Ford River Rouge stamping plant. He attended both the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Detroit Art Academy, and began exhibiting his work in Detroit in 1932 as part of the Detroit Institute of Art’s Michigan Artists Exhibition. Lopez began his own career as an instructor in art schools the following year, when he took a post at the Detroit Art Academy, where he stayed until 1937.

Between 1937 and 1942, Lopez taught at the Meinzinger Art School, also in Detroit, and worked on a series of commissioned mural projects, including those at Dwight and Plymouth. Following his work on the Plymouth mural, Lopez continued work for the Section in 1939, when he painted a mural for the Paw Paw, Michigan post office. This work, titled Bounty, departed from Lopez’s illustrative depiction of nineteenth century agrarian life and the logistics of communication and transportation in Michigan and favored instead a graphic style and a focus on the popular New Deal-era themes of labor and leisure in modern rural America. Soon after completing Bounty in 1940, Lopez painted a mural for the Scarab Club that likewise focused on work and recreation, while still relating to Lopez’s interest in technologies of communication. Titled Business Man at Play, the mural was described by the Detroit Free Press art critic, Poli, as a “mad surrealist design” complete with “said man at a telephone, the wires of which end in the depths of a half lemon.” In addition to depictions of early settler life in Michigan, the themes of communication, technology, industry, and progress and those of labor–both industrial and agricultural–and recreation recur in Lopez’s proposals for Section murals (see Process) and in his paintings.

The year after he completed his work in Paw Paw, Lopez’s historical design depicting a nineteenth-century picnic for a mural for the Birmingham, Michigan post office was selected by the Section. Titled The Pioneering Society’s Picnic, the mural was completed in 1942. A group of Birmingham residents reacted to Lopez and the mural, accusing the Spanish-American artist of being an outsider even though his home of Royal Oak neighbors the northwestern Detroit suburb of Birmingham. Likewise, residents launched racist critiques at the image and the characters that Lopez depicted attending the picnic. Lopez wrote about just one criticism to Edward Rowan of the Section, which was much milder in character but which he believed related to the mural’s creation amidst wartime. The comment was made to Lopez by a Birmingham resident in regards to his focus on a leisure-time activity–the picnic: “[he] said that he was not interested in picnics, because that is what is the matter with the country today. We have had, he said, too many picnics.”

Amidst the vitriol that comprised the public’s reaction to Lopez’s latest mural, the Section invited him to paint his next work for them farther afield. He was offered a commission for the mural decoration inside the new Recorder of Deeds building in Washington, D.C. The mural Lopez created–titled The Death of Colonel Shaw at Fort Wagner–departs from his previous themes for Section murals and favors imagery of war and American heroism through a historical depiction of Shaw’s death during the Civil War. The scene also departs from the graphic style of Bounty and the illustrative style we see in his other murals like The Stage at Dawn–a style Rowan described as having a “lack of finish” and that was discouraged by the Section.

Following his completion of the Recorder of Deeds building mural, Lopez’s career took a turn as he left behind mural commissions to begin work as an artist-correspondent documenting both war production domestically and the United States military presence in West and North Africa. In 1942, Lopez was one of the artists selected by the United States War Department to contribute to the “Soldiers of Production” series. Lopez’s drawings for the series document the production of military vehicles and weapons in the very same Ford River Rouge complex of factories where he worked before he found employment as an artist. Following this project, Lopez began work with the United States Office of Emergency Management and Life magazine painting watercolors of scenes at the United States Air Force base near Accra in 1943. The following year Standard Oil Company as well as Abbott Laboratories in conjunction with the United States Navy commissioned Lopez to complete similar paintings and sketches of the United States military presence in North Africa.

Returning to the United States following the war, Lopez quickly found a place for himself again in the Detroit and broader Michigan art scene. He continued to create and exhibit paintings and drawings himself and with Rhoda. His work continued to show scenes of Detroit’s industry but he likewise developed a large body of drawings and paintings of abstract human forms and faces, his own included. He taught in the summer at the Ox-Bow School of Art in Saugatuck and beginning in 1945, at the University of Michigan Stamps School of Art. Lopez kept his post in Ann Arbor until his death in 1953 at just 44 years old.