A New Deal mural displayed since 1939 in the downtown Ukiah post office is now in a Chicago art-restoration studio, where it will be cleaned and repaired before being returned to Mendocino County, postal officials said Tuesday.
"The mural will come back to the community," said Dallan Wordekemper, federal preservation officer with the postal service. Some Ukiah-area residents have voiced concern over the mural's fate in the wake of the closure of the post office as a budget-cutting measure early this year. The historic building is on the verge of being sold to an undisclosed buyer.
As a result, it's unclear where the mural, "Resources of the Soil," will be displayed upon its return. But Wordekemper said he's hoping to resolve that issue within weeks.
Parma Conservation, which removed the mural for restoration last week, also will be preparing a list of appropriate sites for the local treasure, he said. The restoration could take six months or more, officials said.
The mural could go back to its original home, but public access could be limited by private ownership.
"I think it's really important it appear in one of our civic buildings," said Judy Pruden, a city historian and chairwoman of Ukiah's Planning Commission.
The mural was commissioned as a public work of art and should remain public, she said. A mural in a former post office in Venice, now owned by a movie production company, is available to the public only about one week a year, Wordekemper said.
Pruden believes it would be appropriate for the county museum, located in Willits, to take possession of the mural, but it should be displayed in a public building in Ukiah.
She said it would be a perfect display for the new courthouse planned in Ukiah. The county administrative building or the Ukiah library would be good interim choices, she said.
The mural, 12 feet wide and 6 feet tall, is a little large for Ukiah city hall, she said. It was painted by renowned muralist Benjamin F. Cunningham, who studied under Diego Rivera, Wordekemper said. Cunningham murals also grace Coit Tower in San Francisco.
It is one of thousands of works of art commissioned by the federal government during the Great Depression.
The post office murals were intended to lift the spirits of everyday men and women suffering during that dark economic time. They generally depicted scenes people in the areas they were displayed could relate to. Ukiah's depicted people working in farming and the timber industry.
Many of the murals have been lost or destroyed. Wordekemper's job includes tracking them down. He currently oversees 1,200 murals.
He said he's traced several pieces of artwork to the bowels of the Smithsonian, where some Ukiah residents fear their mural will end up.
"The mural will not go to the Smithsonian," he promised.
You can reach Staff Writer Glenda Anderson at 462-6473 or glenda.anderson@pressdemocrat.com.
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