San Francisco Schools to Pay 600K to Paint Over Mural by Communist Artist

Why? Because it unsettled some students with depictions of slavery and mistreatment of the Indians:

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The educational board has not yet decided how it will cover the artwork. The “Life of Washington” — which depicts slaves being sold at market and working in the fields of the president’s Mount Vernon home and the body of a dead Indian surrounded by white settlers — will either be painted over or have solid panels installed to cover it.

Wow, must have been painted by some white supremacist, huh? Nope, in fact he was a communist:

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In other words, Arnautoff’s purpose was to unsettle the viewer, to provoke young people into looking at American history from a different, darker perspective. Over the past months, art historians, New Deal scholars and even a group called the Congress of Russian Americans have tried to make exactly that point. “This is a radical and critical work of art,” the school’s alumni association argued. “There are many New Deal murals depicting the founding of our country; very few even acknowledge slavery or the Native genocide. The Arnautoff murals should be preserved for their artistic, historical and educational value. Whitewashing them will simply result in another ‘whitewash’ of the full truth about American history.”

What gets me is that they are apparently talking about destroying the piece of art, not just covering up. Why?

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Thus he wanted “the murals to be painted down.” Mark Sanchez, the school board’s vice president, later told me that simply concealing the murals wasn’t an option because it would “allow for the possibility of them being uncovered in the future.”

via International Skeptics Forum https://ift.tt/2xkQoHb