Udall Department of the Interior Building: Poor Mural - Washington DC

State:: WASHINGTON-DC
Site Type:: Art Works, Murals
New Deal Agencies:: Arts Programs, Treasury Section of Fine Arts (TSFA)
Completed:: 1940
Artist:: Henry Varnum Poor
Quality of Information:: Very Good
Marked:: Yes
Site Survival:: Extant

Description

The Stewart Lee Udall Department of the Interior building contains one of the largest collections of New Deal art in Washington DC by some of the finest American artists of the time. The Department of Interior Museum organizes tours by prior arrangement.

Henry Varnum Poor painted “Conservation of American Wildlife” in 1939, with funding from the Treasury Section of Fine Arts. This enormous fresco, covering an entire end wall at the north end of the 3d floor corridor, acknowledges the work of the Bureau of Biological Survey and Bureau of Fisheries (reorganized into the US Fish and Wildlife Service in 1940).

Poor’s mural is installed on the 3d floor. The mural is photographed in overlapping slices below, from left to right. Its brooding shades of gray seem to acknowledge the dire state of wildlife in America.

The Department of Interior Museum offers regular mural tours; check their website for information and registration.

For more information on the Interior building, its art and the artists, see Look and Perrault 1986, available online (below). Artworks begin on p. 110.

Source notes

Look, David and Carole Perrault. The Interior Building: Its Architecture and Its Art. Washington DC: US Department of Interior, National Park Service, 1986. pp. 110-172. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015029850214&view=1up&seq=1

Department of the Interior museum

Site originally submitted by New Deal Art Registry on February 23, 2015.
Additional contributions by Richard A Walker.