ABSTRACT

In 1937, Archibald J. Motley Jr.’s canvas United States Mail, the winning submission to a juried New Deal arts competition coordinated by the Treasury Department’s Section of Painting and Sculpture, left Chicago. Featuring a stagecoach ferrying passengers and freight across the plains, the painting journeyed downstate to its intended home in the post office of Wood River, Illinois, a town so overwhelmingly white that, as the artist later recalled, his very presence drew curious onlookers. Nothing about the subject matter or the style of the work, however, suggests African American authorship, though its dramatic cropping, canted composition, and slightly abstracted forms reveal its maker’s modernist inclinations. 1