The Walls of Justice

Abstract

This article explores the murals on the walls of the U.S. Department of Justice Building in Washington, DC, produced by artists in the 1930s under the aegis of the Section of Painting and Sculpture, part of the New Deal Works Progress Administration. Additional government bodies oversaw the project, including the Department of Justice and the Commission of Fine Arts; other nongovernment bodies, including the Catholic Church, also weighed in. The article examines disputes that arose among these oversight organizations in response to murals by George Biddle, Henry Varnum Poor, John Steuart Curry, and Maurice Sterne, which addressed such topics as tenement life, the prison system, emancipation of the enslaved, and religious rites. By exploring these negotiations in the context of historic government-sponsored public art projects, this article reveals the preference of oversight bodies for artworks that support their own mission, argues for the importance of arts administrators who lay out clear goals and support their artists in achieving them, and offers a crucial perspective for artists and administrators producing public art installations today.