Curator, Jodi Hauptman: In 1932 Lincoln Kirstein organized an exhibition of mural designs for MoMA, inviting painters and photographers to submit works on the theme of the post-war world.
Curator, Samantha Friedman: One of the painters that Kirstein commissioned for this project was Ben Shahn, and Shahn made a mural design on the theme of Sacco and Vanzetti, which depicts these two Italian immigrants to America who were tried, convicted, and executed for murder in these years. It was a flashpoint around ideas of anti-immigrant sentiment, anti-Italian sentiment. And Shahn, as a devoted communist, was intent on depicting this subject in his mural.
And mural is something for everyone. It's a public artwork, and I think this exhibition really coincides with Kirstein’s interest in the left at this time. He was never a communist himself, but many of the artists that he engaged for this project were, and Kirstein was really sympathetic to some of the ideas of these left-leaning artists at the time. Artists like Hugo Gellert, whose print portfolios you see nearby, made a design that showed titans of industry--Rockefeller, Morgan, in cahoots with the gangster Al Capone. And so this caused quite a stir for Kirstein. There was talk about closing the show, about not opening it in the first place, but eventually the murals were allowed to stay.