From our friends at the San Francisco Public Library:

During the Depression, artists in San Francisco showed us their world in vibrant public artworks as big and powerful as the events and people they depicted. Do we still hear the messages? Can we use them? Robert Cherny, history professor emeritus at SF State, will explore and explain these spectacular artifacts of an era that profoundly shaped our own.

With Bob as our guide, we will take a virtual tour of a treasure-trove of spectacular public art. We will visit the famous murals by Diego Rivera at the City Club (formerly the Stock Exchange),the San Francisco Art Institute, and City College. We will see the artwork at Coit Tower, (various artists), Mission High School (Edith Hamlin), Theodore Roosevelt Middle School (Nelson Poole, George Wilson Walker), the Presidio Chapel (Victor Arnautoff ), George Washington High School (Arnautoff, Lucien Labaudt, Ralph Stackpole, Gordon Langdon, Sargent Johnson), the Beach Chalet (Labaudt, Michael Von Meyer), the Maritime Museum (Johnson, Hilaire Hiler), the Mother’s Building at the zoo (the Bruton sisters, Dorothy Puccinelli, Helen Forbes), UCSF (Bernard Zakheim), Rincon Annex (Anton Refregier), and Treasure Island, the site of the Golden Gate International Exposition (various artists).

If you attended Bob’s talk at SHARP about the 1906 earthquake, you saw how careful scholarship can bring the past alive.  With an even more compelling visual display, this talk promises to be better still.

Bob Cherny is a scholar who specializes in American political history from the Civil War to World War II and in the history of California and the West. He received his PhD from Columbia University in 1972 and taught at San Francisco State University from 1971 to 2012. He has been an NEH fellow, a Distinguished Fulbright Lecturer at Lomonosov Moscow State University, a visiting research scholar at the University of Melbourne, and a senior Fulbright lecturer and researcher at Heidelberg University. In addition to more than thirty published essays in journals and anthologies, mostly about the history of politics and labor in California and the West, he was written three books on American politics from 1865 to 1925. He is co-author of two books on the history of San Francisco, a U.S. history survey textbook now in its seventh edition, and a California history textbook now in its second edition. He has co-edited two anthologies—one on U.S. labor during the Cold War, the other on California women and politics. His most recent work, soon to be published, is a biography of Victor Arnautoff, the San Francisco artist who in the thirties created the murals at Coit Tower and George Washington High School, as well as murals elsewhere in the Bay Area.