The UALR Gallery program has received a $30,000 grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities for a project to photograph and produce a film about the mural by Joe Jones – “The Struggle of the South” – in an effort to rescue and restore the work.

The NEH grant came from the Chairman’s Emergency Fund to support the project which will document the mural fragments photographically. The grant also will support travel, research, and film production for a documentary which chronicles the mural’s restoration.

Brad Cushman, gallery director and curator of the Permanent Collection of Art, and Cheryl Hellmann, director of UALR University Television, are collaborating on the documentary.

“It is the largest example of the artist’s work in existence, and the UALR Art Department has kept watch over this mural for 25 years,” Cushman said. “Jones lived from 1909 to 1963 and worked amid the poverty of the Great Depression. His vibrant paintings, which achieved national acclaim in the 1930s, showcase the heart of American struggle – urban and rural, black and white, rich and poor.”

Jones began as a modernist painter, but came to admire the Communist Party’s commitment to improving conditions for the working class. He eventually joined the party in 1933. Jones increasingly turned his attention to the indictment of social injustice. His dramatic paintings and prints addressed racial and class issues, condemning the horrific practice of lynching and promoting the cause of an empowered and racially integrated proletariat.

In 1984, the UALR Archives – now the UALR Center for Arkansas History and Culture – purchased the 44-by-8-foot mural in 29 pieces known as “The Struggle of the South.” Jones painted the mural in 1935 while attending Commonwealth College.

The mural imagery depicts sharecropping, coal mining, and lynching, and was described in news accounts at the time as representing the struggle in the South and later became recognized as such. The mural is painted on masonite and exists in 29 pieces. In 1984, it was salvaged from an old house south of Fort Smith, Ark.

From 1985 to the present, the mural has been stored in the UALR Art Department in the Gallery Permanent Collection storage area. In 2009, representatives from the Saint Louis Museum of Art contacted Cushman to inquire about the mural’s existence and condition. Until the museum made the contact, the mural was assumed to have been lost and destroyed.

The Saint Louis Art Museum staff visited Little Rock in 2009 and immediately began to discuss including the piece in the upcoming exhibit, “Joe Jones: Radical Painter of the American Scene.”

“The condition of the mural would not allow this to happen, but the museum agreed to restore a section of the mural for the exhibition at its expense,” Cushman said. “The newly restored section measures 92 inches by 91.25 inches, leaving about 37 feet remaining which still needs to be restored.”

The NEH grant will support production of the documentary and a photographic documentation of the 29 mural fragments.

“The still photography will provide images that will be included in the documentary, material for further research and study after the mural has been fully restored, and a file of security imagery as the university releases the mural fragments to shippers and handlers and ultimately to the conservators,” Cushman said.

The film documentary will continue through the completion of the project at the final installation and re-dedication of the mural.

For more information about the NEH grant or the Jones mural, contact Brad Cushman at 501-569-8977.