Imagined Realism

1936: Ruth Harper paints a nursery rhyme mural for kindergarteners, with Cinderella at its center Courtesy Westchester Historical Society

1937: Walt Disney's animated film becomes the top-grossing movie in America, its story line alluding to hardship and magic

1938: Abram Champanier invites Alice to "another wonderland--New York" in a set of 16 murals for the pediatric ward at Gouverneur Hospital

1941: Ruth Harper's painting re-opens the threshold to Oz, allowing Dorothy Gale to visit whenever she wishes

Fantasy gives art a new meaning, calling it to life for an entrancing playfulness that covers the dullness of days. But when the time passes, and we return through the threshold of what connected us to real life, the feeling goes back into the painting. By crossing into these imagined worlds, we encounter magical narratives represented through various other-than-human entities, suggesting that multiple stories, identities, and emotional states can exist at once. We’re taught that this passage is temporary, our return to reality reinforcing a contrast between lived experience and idealized visions within the artwork.

But are we the same person when we return? Ruth Harper must have loved fairy tales and fantasy as a child, enough so to guide her young art students across the threshold through stories and imaginary worlds. Her Federal Art Project mural for a Yonkers kindergarten is a mixture of in-world actions and Cinderella’s direct gaze outward. Likewise, Harper’s interpretation of The Wizard of Oz embodies a tension between departure and return: where Victor Fleming’s 1939 film adaptation ultimately resolves in a reaffirmation of home and reality, Harper’s painting sustains a sense of whimsy through vibrant colors and imaginative details, resisting the somber tones associated with Depression social realist photography.

If remaining a child at heart sounds irresponsible, consider a series of sixteen murals created by Abram Champanier for the Federal Art Project. It begins with the main character from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) being invited out of a book to see “another wonderland—New York!” Alice travels to see the Central Park Zoo, Coney Island, the subway, and the Empire State Building. In one panel Alice, the Mad Hatter, and others fly in an airplane above the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges, “spellbound by the wonder of it all.” Especially intriguing is one interaction that occurs at the New York Public Library: Patience, one of its iconic stone lions, has become animated and interacts with the fantasy characters!

Champanier’s murals were created for the pediatric ward in Gouverneur Hospital, on Manhattan’s lower east side. How could we think of them as simply decorations, or happy images to brighten the children’s spirits? Everyone navigates the spaces of where they are and where they want to be; the reality is that we move fluidly between imagined possibilities.