Alice is heading back into New York, this time on museum walls.
The Museum of the City of New York will show all 16 panels of Abram Champanier’s mural, Alice of Wonderland Visiting New York, in the exhibition “Another Wonderland: Abram Champanier’s Alice Mural,” on view from June 6 through September.
Commissioned by the Federal Art Project, the mural imagined Lewis Carroll’s Alice exploring the city. In 16 brightly colored panels, Champanier showed Alice, the White Rabbit and the Mad Hatter flying over the Empire State Building, boarding a crowded subway and strolling through Central Park.
“What could be more New York than this hodgepodge crew crashing the city?” Lilly Tuttle, curator at the Museum of the City of New York, told the New York Times’ Hilarie M. Sheets.
Tuttle said Champanier designed the mural to help sick children transport themselves out of the ward through imagination. “For viewers today, the mural is a reminder of what federal funding for the arts could do for cities like New York and how public art could inject light and energy into unexpected spaces.”
Champanier was born in Russia in 1896 and immigrated with his family to New Jersey when he was 9. He studied at the Art Students League and later worked as a muralist in a style he called “Staccatoism,” according to a museum statement.
In 1935, he won the commission for Gouverneur Hospital through the Federal Art Project, part of the Works Progress Administration. Brooklyn College says the program funded about 2,500 public murals, 108,000 easel paintings, 19,000 sculptures and 36,000 posters. The project also had a non-discrimination clause, which meant it hired artists of color and women artists who had limited opportunities elsewhere.
Champanier began painting the Alice mural in 1938 on panels more than 2.1 metres tall. In 1940, the canvases were installed in the children’s ward and fused to the walls with lead paste.
They remained there until the hospital lost accreditation in 1961. The building was abandoned in 1978 and later fell into disrepair, when Andrew S. Dolkart of the Landmarks Preservation Commission found the paintings in the ward.
“The room was a ruin,” Dolkart, an architectural historian, told the Times. But the panels were “witty and fun and bright, and even in that abandoned space you could tell that they were pretty wonderful and shouldn’t be just torn down.”
Yet, he added, “The city had no interest in the mural.”
Dolkart brought in conservators Alan and Denise Farancz, who had experience extracting wall art. In 1981, as the hospital was being demolished, the team removed the mural from the ward walls.
Over the next four decades, a changing team cleaned and conserved the panels. In 2008, restorers John Lippert and Dawn D’Aluisio took over their care and made replicas of two lost panels, showing a fishing boat and the Statue of Liberty.
The exhibition includes the mural panels framed individually, along with information about Champanier and the therapeutic use of art. According to the Times, Alice of Wonderland Visiting New York is the only surviving Works Progress Administration commission for a children’s hospital ward.
“It was really a gift to the kids who were in the hospital when there was no TV, no iPads, no video games and they needed something to keep them entertained and pass the time,” Tuttle told NY1’s Roger Clark.
After the exhibition, the murals will be installed at NYC Health + Hospitals Gouverneur, a 295-bed nursing facility on the Lower East Side, according to NY1.
Read more from Smithsonian Magazine.
