The Bob Graham Center for Public Service provides a wide variety of programs for students and the larger public on topics related to public service, public leadership and civic engagement.
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The Barefoot Mailman and Florida’s Post Office Murals
February 20, 2024 @ 3:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Post office murals are visible and enduring symbols of New Deal ideology that provide lasting evidence of governmental art patronage during the Great Depression. Not just for picking up mail or sending packages, post offices offered patrons during the 1930s a place to meet neighbors and catch up on the news. In Florida, 16 new post offices were built between 1937 and 1943, and each was decorated with murals or relief sculptures paid for by the Treasury Department’s Section of Painting and Sculpture. This presentation discusses the West Palm Beach post office’s exciting mural series featuring Florida’s “Barefoot Mail Carrier,” its subject, and how it fits into the Great Depression’s larger mural project.
Keri Watson is the assistant director of the School of Visual Arts and Design and an associate professor of art history at the University of Central Florida. She serves as an executive editor for Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art and is the author of Florida’s New Deal Parks and Post Office Murals (forthcoming), This is America: Re-Viewing the Art of the United States (Oxford University Press 2023), and the Routledge Companion to Art and Disability (2022). Dr. Watson’s research has been recognized and supported by a Fulbright Fellowship and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Terra Foundation for American Art, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.