C. S. Price Mural, Pendleton High School (Pendleton Junior High) – Pendleton OR

Description

With funding from the New Deal’s Federal Art Project, C. S. Price painted a 21 x 4 foot mural for the newly constructed Pendleton Junior High School in 1937. Titled “Agriculture,” the five panel composition draws upon images of farming and ranching life that characterized many of his paintings. The theme also suited Pendleton’s cultural and economic base. Although originally located in Pendleton’s junior high school, the mural hangs in the foyer of the Pendleton High School auditorium today.

Clayton Sumner Price, known as C.S. Price, grew up in a large farming family in Iowa, Wyoming, and Alberta and worked on ranches as a young man. He moved to Oregon in 1909 to work as an illustrator for Pacific Monthly Magazine. Primarily a self-taught artist, he shifted over time from realism to the colorful modernism that characterized his work from the 1920s on. Ultimately, his body of work on western landscapes earned him praise as the Dean of Oregon’s painters.

Although C. S. Price’s “Agriculture” mural was the largest of his New Deal funded paintings, he completed over twenty works of art for the Public Works of Art Project and the Federal Arts Project. They can be found at the Portland Art Museum, Timberline Lodge, and Multnomah County Library as well as at Pendleton High School. In the 1990s, “Agriculture” was restored and relocated from its original junior high school site to the Pendleton High School. The relocation accommodated the junior high’s conversion to City Hall.