Lawrence Massacre, Mural design for the Fort Scott Post Office, Ethel Magafan

Exhibition Label: "Windmills to Workshops: Lawrence and the Visual Arts," Jul-2004, Kate Meyer After receiving a commission for a mural in Nebraska from the Treasury Department’s program to bring art into typically rural cities, Colorado painter Ethel Magafan created these studies in an attempt to win another commission for a mural in Fort Scott, Kansas. Though her entry Lawrence Massacre was a finalist for the prize, the work was rejected due to its depiction of political and violent events “the people of the locale are trying to forget.” A later study for the mural, now at the Denver Art Museum, reveals more detail in the faces and bodies of the figures than in these versions, yet maintains their simplified geometric form. Magafan interprets the Lawrence attack led by William Clark Quantrill on August 21, 1863. The early-morning raid left most of the downtown in ruin and as many as 200 people dead. Archive Label 1999: As did Ward Lockwood and John Steuart Curry, Ethel Magafan also painted murals for the federal government during the Great Depression. Like Lockwood's studies, also in this show, these watercolors were preparatory designs for Kansas post office commissions. Unlike Lockwood and Curry, however, Magafan's designs were never realized on a government wall. In rejecting the Fort Scott design, the administrator explained to the artist that "unfortunately you chose a theme which the people of the locale are trying to forget." He did not mention that Magafan's semi-abstract style also likely contributed to her rejection. Edward Bruce, one of the directors of the Roosevelt administration's art program, abhorred abstractionist "tripe" and sought instead an art that gave him "the same feeling I get when I smell a sound, fresh ear of corn." Magafan's watercolors clearly did not agree with such ideals.