What if I told you there was a hidden art gallery scattered across the country? What if I told you some of its treasures had vanished?
What if I told you that I found them?
To lift the U.S. out of the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt thought the country needed more than roads and bridges and schools and hospitals. It needed art. So he built an art gallery and scattered it across the country — in everybody’s local post office.
In the 80 years since, hundreds of those works have gone missing, were sold or destroyed. We found them. And found photos. They’re glorious.
The two missing post office murals from Columbia, Mo.
This work started with a Freedom of Information Act request. A reader told me the mural in their local post office was in horrible disrepair, and that untold others like it needed conservation, or, worse, were lost to the ages.
So I put in a request for records on July 7, 2021:
I got a response on July 31, 2023 — more than two years later. The Postal Service mailed me a flash drive with nearly 2,000 historical photos of these artworks, and its internal database tracking them all.
Looking at the images for the first time, I felt like I found a part of the Grand Canyon that’d been missing. These works are part of our national heritage. They tell our story. Imagine if part of Old Faithful went missing and no one knew about it.
Three murals by Gordon K. Grant missing from the Alhambra, Calif., post office: “El Indio,” “El Paysano,” and “El Gringo.”
With support from my editor at the time, Robbie DiMesio, I took off reporting, spending days at the National Archives campus in College Park, Md., and diving through historical records at the Smithsonian National Postal Museum and Smithsonian American Art Museum.
The world kept turning. News kept happening. Our project kept getting shelved. I moved to a different team at The Washington Post. My new editor, Mike Madden, was intrigued by the project, but not immediately sold. Eventually he became its biggest champion.
In the time between, every time I traveled for work (or for fun, apologies to my wife), I’d go see a post office mural and do some reporting. Some communities have protected these works at all cost. Others never even knew they were there.
I came down with covid-19 in early 2024 and spent a week in isolation and delirious boredom locked in my bedroom. Finally, I asked my wife to bring me my mural notes. I wrote my first draft of the story, then slept for 12 hours.
I kept pitching the story to Mike and other WaPo teammates, and by this summer, we’d assembled the crew that shared a vision for this project and how to get it over the finish line. It is bittersweet to see it out in the world. Every person who touched this piece was either stunningly laid off by The Post last week, or is leaving for a new job.
The night before the layoffs, they were up late working on this thing, in case they lost their jobs and access to our internal systems in the morning. I sat at my kitchen table and cried.
I’m excited to share this project — and the backstory — with you, because it’s a statement about institutions: The post office, The Post, our national artistic canon. And the great thing about art (and art about art) is that it’s for you to interpret what it means about our world, and how it makes you feel.
I hope you’ll share those thoughts with me. Email me at [email protected] and contact me securely on Signal at jacobbogage.87. And follow me on Bluesky: @jacobbogage.bsky.social.
