Bellevue Hospital: Amero Mural (destroyed) – New York NY

Description

In the late 1930s Emilio Amero completed work on the mural entitled  “Tropical and Hudson Valley Vegetation,” for the entrance lobby in the new Psychiatric Building of Bellevue Hospital. It was one of over a dozen murals painted by artists for the new building with funds provided by the Federal Art Project arm of the Works Progress Administration. It so happens, that the new building for which Emilio Amero painted the mural was also a New Deal project. The building was constructed with the support of the  federal Public Works Administration (PWA).

Emilio Amero was a Mexican printmaker and painter who spent much of the 1930s employed as a WPA artist in the U.S. Amero was particularly interested in the printmaking techniques of lithography as well as fresco painting. He was a constitutive part of the post-Revolutionary art movement in Mexico, working with such prominent figures as Rufino Tamayo, Fermín Revueltas, Ramón Alva de la Canal, and José Clemente Orozco among others. He painted murals in Mexico City in addition to the murals he painted in the U.S.

The British Museum, tells us that Amero’s mural, ““Tropical and Hudson Valley Vegetation,” “… was destroyed shortly after completion in 1938 because its content was apparently unsuitable for a psychiatric hospital.”