Conservation in Context
The Evander Childs High School Murals Project
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The Evolution of Western Civilization
James Michael Newell
A Federal Art Project completed in 1938
Our murals show the general pattern of man's advancement from the first intellectual awakening of primitive man, and the important forces and conditions which influenced the development.
On the east wall a panel represents man becoming aware of the elements. His first concern is the necessity of feeding and sheltering himself and his family. Nomad life gives way to settled community living and there arises the need of a code of law and order, and a means of educating inquiring minds. With overcrowding or soil exhaustion, people migrate to new worlds, colonizing, spreading knowledge, developing more complicated and interdependent living.
On the north wall the first panel shows the result of repeated emigration. An eastern and a western type of philosophy have developed, and the two in their expansion must eventually come together, mingle and vie for supremacy. The former, cultured, inquisitive, and spiritual, scientifically searching for truths is eclipsed by the physical force of the powerful builders and law-makers in a centralized government.
In the second panel the results of man's congested and ignorant living conditions is shown when plague and devastation sweep the land in the dark ages. Spreading and growing ever more powerful highly organized monastic orders are keeping alive the arts and learning in their cloistered religious isolation. Breaking away from church restraint and searching to better man's lot and cure his ills again the inquisitive mind directs itself toward the unknown; and we see the beginnings of intensive research in biochemistry.
The center over-door panel symbolizes an awakening in the minds of people to the beauty and variety in nature and to the importance of life about them. The force of their enlightenment destroys their bondage to centuries of ignorance and serfdom.
In the next panel the western world has reached a high point in its development. Belief in the individual has strengthened his inventive and artistically creative powers. He is embarking on voyages of emigration and discovery. He has developed a printing press to preserve and disseminate knowledge. Man learns the folly and emptiness of superstition. In the right background three skeptics turn back.
The end panel on the north wall is the heritage of America. Norsemen, Spaniards the Dutch, and the English, all contribute to the discovery and founding of a new country. Their combined spirits live again in the pioneer, who, wiping out aboriginals, continues to expand frontiers westward.
On the long west end wall, America, developed into a varied, dynamic, and powerful civilization, is symbolized by arbitrarily juxtaposed conditions and interrelated activities which characterize modern times. Over the center door the broken chains and open book symbolizing freedom and knowledge for all, form a background for a quotation from Walt Whitman's "With Antecedents" which unifies the thought.
- And that where I am, or you are, this present day,
there is the centre of all days, all races,
And there is the meaning, to us, of all that has ever
come of races and days, or ever will come.
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