Seymour Fogel Sites

Artist Seymour Fogel painted two murals, entitled "African Music and European Music" and "Religious and Modern Music", in the Music Room (Room 327) of the Abraham Lincoln High School in 1936-37.  The New York Schools website shows only a portion of the first mural on its excellent Public Art for Public Schools pages, so it is uncertain if the latter mural is still extant.

The Wilbur J. Cohen building, originally built for the Social Security Administration in 1938-1940, is home to many social security themed artworks funded by the Treasury Section of Fine Arts. Two of the artworks are murals by Seymour Fogel, "Wealth of the Nation" and "Security of the People," painted in 1938 and installed in 1942 in the lobby at Independence Avenue entrance. The Social Security Administration never occupied the building, which was turned over to the War Department in 1941.  After the war, the Federal Security Agency (FSA), under which the Social Security Board had been placed in 1939, moved into the building. In...

Seymour Fogel painted this oil on canvas mural, entitled "People of the Soil," in 1940 with funds provided by the Treasury Section of Fine Arts. It is viewable in the Cambridge post office lobby.   "People of the Soil" is "a Regionalist work in both its subject matter and its perspective. The mural, which depicts a family of Minnesota agriculturalists, does not aim to achieve a journalistic fidelity to reality. Instead, it presents us with the kind of rural idyll we often see in Grant Wood’s paintings; it presents us with an idealized view of rural life in 1930s Minnesota. "In this piece, we...

This post office contains six tempera murals painted in 1942 by Seymour Fogel. Fogel painted these as the winner of one of the 48-State Competition Post Office murals. "In 1939, for example, Seymour Fogel sketched an elegant scene of Southwest Indian dancers for a post office mural in Safford, Arizona. Local Anglos harboring resentful memories of Apache raids, however, deemed Fogel's design an "abomination," and the artist substituted a stereotypical picture of wagon trains and pioneers." (muse.jhu.edu)