Murals tell a story that must be preserved

In the face of Trump's reign of destruction, we have a responsibility to save

An earlier America — here, the Erie Canal two centuries ago — is evoked in WPA-sponsored murals in Albany, by the artist William Brantley Van Ingen.

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Sometimes you don’t notice the treasures around you until you’re reminded to pay attention. So it took an email from a friend in Manhattan, oddly, to finally propel me down the river to a grand old building in Albany the other day, where I got a look at a classic set of giant murals depicting the history of the area. They’re gorgeous, but it’s a story linked to their creation that really interested me, because it reminds us of the values that once were important in America that now are being trashed by a rising culture of carelessness.

The 23 canvas murals, each 17 feet high and four feet wide, and set among massive stained-glass windows, cover 4,500 feet of walls in a 1909 building that is now a library for University at Albany graduate students. They were designed in 1937 by artist William Brantley Van Ingen under a grant from the Works Progress Administration, a New Deal agency.¹

They are an almost forgotten artistic treasure just a few blocks west of New York’s state capitol. For a couple of years when I first moved Upstate, I lived on the third floor of a Gilded Age mansion just down the block, yet I had never heard of the Van Ingen murals.

Let’s pause here for just a moment to consider why they exist: It is because in the depths of the Great Depression, when money was scarce, the United States government decided that artists deserved emergency support no less than laborers and farmers, because a civilized society values art. Underlying the WPA’s Federal Art Project, which funded the Van Ingen murals, was the notion that art in public buildings open to all could celebrate American culture and foster a sense of national unity.

So the WPA paid some 10,000 artists $23.60 a week, and set the artists to work without dictates about the content of their work. Between 1935 and 1943, the project produced roughly 200,000 works of art that took their place in schools, hospitals and other public buildings.² Like just about every other living American, I’ve grown up with the presence of this art in the public buildings where we have transacted the business of lives. The post office I use in downtown Troy has murals of Rip Van Winkle and the Headless Horsemen of Sleepy Hollow.

Imagine somebody proposing a similar initiative now. Even before the style and content directives could emerge from Trump administration appointees — with the Fox News message enforcement team on the job, of course — there would be social media pushback about paying tax dollars to artists, even if they’re MAGA-certified as starry-eyed nationalists. No, we should worry if today’s artificial intelligence bubble bursts, sending stocks and household income plunging, because there will be no government rescue for artists and their art.

That is why the display of federally-funded art down the river from me seemed so precious when I finally got to see it this week. Government ought to reflect the shared interests of a people, but Donald Trump has shown no interest in encouraging Americans’ artistic aspirations, or at least not any that wouldn’t have been welcome in his Queens neighborhood in the 1950s. You can grasp Trump’s priorities in noting that he wants to shut down and zero-out the budgets of the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services. His administration often explains this sort of funding cut by arguing that federal dollars ought to be spent in line with the president’s priorities — which, it seems, are deportating recent immigrants, freeing his billionaire pals’ business interests from regulation and getting even with anybody who has ever annoyed him. Also, cutting the size of government so it can fit under the president’s personal purview.

It’s in the context of that last goal — Trump’s initiative to alter the government’s role in Americans’ lives — that I arrived to see the Van Ingen murals in Albany. What they represent, I came to realize, is the challenge that Americans are confronting in this 47^th presidency.

Just two blocks from the U.S. Capitol on Washington’s Independence Avenue — about as near the seat of federal power, that is, as the Van Ingen murals are to New York State’s capitol — stands the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building, built during the New Deal. It is now empty. For 60 years it was the home of the now-shuttered Voice of America, though it was initially built to house the administration of the Social Security system. Because of that original plan, the building was erected with extraordinary artwork created during that fertile era for artistic expression before World War II, including frescoes by Ben Shahn, murals by Philip Guston, and more.³

But the building is on a list of 45 federal structures listed for “accelerated disposition” this year — office buildings, courthouses and parking garages, from New Mexico to New Jersey and everywhere in between.⁴ Many of those structures are undistinguished, but the Cohen building is a gem: Gray Brechin, a noted historical geographer who tracks the fate of such buildings nationally, called it “a kind of Sistine Chapel of the New Deal.” Being a sort of civic shrine, though, may not save the Cohen building from becoming a pile of rubble in a matter of months.

Brechin is the cofounder of a nonprofit called The Living New Deal, which aims to document the impact on every corner of the country of the programs that transformed modern America. The project hopes to encourage Americans to protect the New Deal’s handiwork — the great infrastructure, works of art and social welfare programs — as well as encourage the notion that government ought to be dedicated to meeting the needs of even the least and most hopeless of citizens. A friend of mine, the author and historian Kevin Baker, leads the organization’s New York City chapter. It was a note from Kevin and a fine essay last month by the essential Substack writer Heather Cox Richardson that let me know about the Cohen building’s plight — and because of that, I decided to inspect my nearby examples of the New Deal vision.

But the Cohen building hasn’t been as lucky as the old hall that houses the Van Ingen murals, which has been lovingly protected by the State University of New York. Cohen and its artworks have been neglected — though why a strategically-placed Washington building that displays such extraordinary art wound up in disrepair and on the auction block is a sad testament to government ineptitude, well detailed by Timothy Noah in The New Republic. What emerges at this point is that nobody in a position to save the building seems inclined to do so, and a private buyer surely won’t have the resources to invest in restoring it.

Most notably, we can’t expect sympathy from the President of the United States. Among many Trump incidents bitterly remembered by New Yorkers is his blithe razing of the classic and elegant 1929 Bonwit Teller building on Fifth Avenue in 1982 to make way for the Trump Tower. That episode included destruction of giant limestone relief panels of dancing women at the building’s pinnacle, and the loss of geometric-patterned bronze latticework — both of which Trump had promised to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He fibbed, decimated the beautiful stuff, and pretended it was all for the best. Imagine that.⁵

It is because of such behavior that the people who knew Donald Trump before — that is, before his career as a reality TV star and before his turn to political candidacy — never had hope that he could be a positive force in American life. Demolition of the Cohen building, then, would be emblematic of the carelessness that Trump brings personally or inspires in others in virtually everything he touches.

Consider, to begin, what he has torn down during his presidency.

The U.S. Agency for International Development saved more than 90 million lives over the past two decades; if the cuts Trump ordered in shuttering the agency continue for just the next five years, 14 million people who might have otherwise lived will die.⁶

Trump’s refusal to address the dangers of climate change will cause extra greenhouse gases to be released into the atmosphere, leading to 1.3 million more heat-related deaths worldwide.⁷

Our nation’s higher education sector has long been the envy of the world, drawing the brightest students to this country, which many have made their home, bolstering American scientific achievements and the applicable technology that follows: 40 percent of the Nobel Prizes won by Americans in chemistry, medicine and physics in this century were awarded to immigrants. But this fall the number of new foreign students enrolled in American institutions dropped by 17 percent, on top of a 7 percent drop last fall. Experts say the reasons are easy to see: Trump administration attacks on higher education, cuts to federal aid and overt hostility to foreigners. ⁸

There is so much more destruction, though — so many elements of American government that have been demolished in the first ten months of the 47^th presidency.

The Department of Education has been gutted. With Robert F. Kennedy Jr. leading federal health efforts, the credibility of the government on drug policy, vaccinations and other health-related matters has been wrecked. The Justice Department’s reputation for nonpartisan pursuit of truth has been ruined. Eliminating the Voice of America and other programs presenting honest journalism to the world has opened world airways to the propaganda machines of competing nations. Perhaps most alarmingly, the Trumpdozer has even hit the elegant separation of powers established in our Constitution, burying authority that had until now been jealously guarded by Congress and protected by the Supreme Court, historical destruction that hasn’t yet met a suitably-sized barrier.

Against this ruinous policy backdrop, the images of Trump’s tear-down of the White House East Wing last month were both gut-churning and unsurprising. The Trump Ballroom fiasco is a perfect metaphor of the man’s approach to every aspect of his current role: reckless disregard of precedent and rule, and incautious proceeding without regard for consequence.

It’s easy enough, and perhaps valid, to blame this on toxic narcissism, which many experts say is surely Trump’s mental illness. Psychologists have a label — destructive narcissistic pattern (DNP) — that applies to someone who “can be charming when charm is perceived to be to his benefit,” according to a 1998 scientific paper, but overall “lacks empathy, has a sense of entitlement and is emotionally shallow.”⁹ But mental illness evokes sympathy; Trump deserves none for the destruction he is wreaking on the nation.

What he needs is pushback.

But why worry about one building, a person could reasonably ask, in the face of so much destruction of greater consequence in the Trump era? That is, the likely sale and demolition of the Cohen building is hardly on the scale of Trump’s dismissal of climate change, which people fret about and fight to little avail, or his seeming willingness to abandon Ukraine to Russian domination at the risk of permanently weakening the West’s defense against aggression. And his manipulation of the justice system to his personal partisan advantage is far more destructive of American democracy than any disregard for historic preservation can be.

But letting New Deal masterpieces slip away is part and parcel of Trump’s initiative that we might call the New Demolition. Franklin D. Roosevelt established government mechanisms to protect citizens in an increasingly complex world, one where the power of vast corporate networks and global pressures had for too long been squelching the initiative of farmers and laborers, the backbone of America’s growth from colonial times. Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society built upon that framework, and today we depend upon Medicare and Medicaid for health protection; likewise, a crowded planet needs environmental protection, and a sophisticated economy demands thoughtful regulation.

A government, after all, is nothing more than the sum of its citizens aspirations and the executor of its hopes. If we empower it thoughtfully, it can be a vehicle for the betterment of all.

Trump’s New Demolition aims to hobble all of that. At its base, it presents the notion of a global arena where power accrues (rightly so, his supporters say) to those who wield it most viciously. It is a simplistic scheme of survival of the fittest that is at odds with the advances of civilization since the Enlightenment, and certainly with the teachings of the world’s religions.

So here’s why the Cohen building matters: If we turn a blind eye to the beauty created around us that is now at risk, we let go of a bit more of the civilization that has been built by generations before us. Each of us, then, needs to do what we can to protect those parts of our great legacy that are within our reach.

It brings to mind a lyrical passage in one of the Epistles of the New Testament,¹⁰ which implores us to focus on hope: “Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable — if anything is excellent or praiseworthy — think about such things.”

And in thinking about what is excellent and praiseworthy in a time of destruction — about the treasures around us that we may not notice until we’re reminded, and what we aspire to build for the future — we are compelled to work, tirelessly, before the preservation of what we value becomes impossible.

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1. https://scholarsarchive.library.albany.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=dewey

2. Kalfatovic, Martin R. (1994). The New Deal Fine Arts Projects: A Bibliography, 1933–1992. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press. ISBN 0-8108-2749-2.

3. https://newrepublic.com/article/201204/ben-shahn-murals-new-deal-cohen-building-trump

4. https://www.gsa.gov/real-estate/real-estate-services/real-property-disposition/assets-identified-for-accelerated-disposition

5. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/donald-trump-bonwit-teller-friezes-met-2132673

6. https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/07/01/nx-s1-5452513/trump-usaid-foreign-aid-deaths

7. https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-climate-rollbacks-heat-deaths

8. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/17/us/international-students-enrollment-decrease.html

9. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1996-06226-008

10. Philippians 4:8 https://www.christianity.com/bible/niv/philippians/4-8

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THANK YOU for reading The Upstate American, and for joining us in the conversation about our common ground, this great country. As we together navigate these challenging times, I hope you’ll join us again next week — or send me a message with ideas you’d like to see us address. I love to hear from readers.

-REX SMITH