Stamford High alumni seeks to raise $50K to return WPA mural to school
By Donna Porstner - Stamford Advocate - 4/7/2008 - originalSTAMFORD - An alumni group is attempting to raise $50,000 to return a Depression-era mural to Stamford High School nearly 40 years after it was tossed out during a renovation.
The Friends of Stamford High Alumni Association is soliciting donations to restore the mural, titled "Sports," which once wrapped around the doorway to the music auditorium.
"We thought it was a project alums would like supporting, especially those who went to Stamford High before they were torn down," said Diane Sierpina, class of 1972, the association's co-chairwoman.
"Sports" is one of seven murals that once graced the school's walls by James Daugherty, a Weston artist and children's book author and illustrator who created them under the Works Progress Administration in 1934.
The murals were cut into 30 pieces and thrown in the trash during a 1970 renovation. A former student found mural remnants and turned them over to Hiram Hoelzer, an art conservator in New York.
The city spent $400,000 to buy four murals back from Hoelzer in 2002.
Because the murals are so valuable, Sierpina said the association wants to hang "Sports" in the media center, because it is locked when school is not in session.
The alumni group hopes to raise enough money to hang the restored murals as part of a series of events commemorating the 135th anniversary of the school's founding.
Patriot Bank donated $2,500 to get the project started. The association plans to e-mail 5,000 alumni this week.
"This is very exciting," said Patricia Phagan, curator of prints and drawings at Vassar College's Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., which has sketches of more than 60 New Deal-era murals in its collection, including some by Daugherty.
"Daugherty is very well known for his paintings in the '20s and '30s. He's a really very well-known artist," she said.
Daugherty, who early in his career drew cartoons for The New Yorker, also painted murals for the Greenwich first selectman's office that are now on display at Greenwich Library, the Fairfield Court housing complex's social room and Holmes Elementary School in Darien.
John Solum, a Westport resident who has been restoring Daugherty murals all over the country since 1994, said Stamford High deserves to have one of the murals returned because they were painted there and many students and teachers posed as models.
Solum recently was awarded the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism's Distinguished Advocate Award, in part, for his work on restoring the Daugherty murals.
"Sports," which is more than 8 feet high and more than 11 feet wide, won't fit in the music auditorium anymore because the ceilings have been lowered, Solum said.
The mural, also known as "Sports Frenzy," depicts a female basketball player and a male football player carried on a teammate's shoulder.
It is one of two of the original seven Stamford High murals the city has in storage.
One was lost, two are privately owned and two are on display in public buildings downtown. "School Activities" was put on display at the University of Connecticut-Stamford campus on Broad Street in 2005, and "New England Tradition," which depicts historical figures such as abolitionist John Brown and "Uncle Tom's Cabin" author Harriet Beecher Stowe, was put up at the Ferguson Library last year.
- For more information on the mural restorattion project, e-mail the association at [email protected] or go to www.stamfordhigh.org
