UA Little Rock Awarded $80K NEH Grant to Develop Educational Materials On Joe Jones’ Iconic Mural

The University of Arkansas at Little Rock has received a nearly $80,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to create a curriculum and digital education tools centered around Joe Jones’ 1935 mural, “The Struggle in the South.”

“It is such an honor to know that we have received a competitive grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities,” said Dr. Marta Cieslak, director of UA Little Rock Downtown and principal investigator on the grant. “The project centers on the history encapsulated in Jones’s mural, focusing mostly on Arkansas during the 1920s and 1930s. Too many people in Arkansas don’t know the mural exists, and we’re happy to have this opportunity to make the mural more accessible to the public.”

Now housed at UA Little Rock Downtown, Jones created his mural at Commonwealth College in Mena, Arkansas, in 1935. The 44′ x 9′ mural portrays the plight of ordinary Southerners in the 1930s, including striking miners, sharecropping families, and African Americans facing violence.

UA Little Rock received a $79,233 grant for the project, “Contextualizing the Struggle in the South: Place-Based Experiential Learning as a Path to Public Humanities.” The project runs until Dec. 31, 2026.

Other investigators involved in the project include Danielle Afsordeh, community outreach archivist at CALS Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, Emily Housdan, programming and administrative assistant at UA Little Rock Downtown, Dr. Jess Porter, director of the Center for Arkansas History and Culture, who also serves as the project co-director, and Dr. James Ross, associate professor of history at UA Little Rock.

The project will examine and document the history of Arkansas and the South, focusing on the themes and issues captured in the mural. The grant team will collect archival documents and develop two college history courses – an Arkansas history course taught during the spring 2025 semester and a public history course taught during the fall 2025 semester. Both classes will be open to all students, who will gain hands-on experience by creating materials for the educational website tied to the project.

The project team will create a website that will map the mural-inspired history of Arkansas. The website, which will also feature historical sources, will be available to everyone, including educators, researchers, historians, and members of the public.

“You can obtain exciting and unexpected results when you put a motivated group of students before exceptional educators,” Porter said. “They’ll come out knowing much more about the 1930s and the thematic elements of the mural, including racial violence, organized labor, and sharecropping. They may develop a new understanding of a just and equitable world and how they might lead us there.”

“I feel privileged to be able to be a part of this important project,” Afsordeh said. “‘The Struggle in the South’ is such a magnificent mural and such an asset to the university and greater community. Jones’s work centers around social protests of the early 20th century that can be difficult to understand without knowledge of the historical context in which it was created. I look forward to helping contextualize its importance within the greater narrative of Arkansas history.”

UA Little Rock purchased the mural in 1984. Conservation work began in 2010 when a portion of the mural was displayed in the “Joe Jones: Painter of the American Scene” exhibit at the Saint Louis Art Museum. Following renewed interest in Jones’s work, UA Little Rock received three grants to complete restorative work on the mural, including $536,000 from the Arkansas Natural and Cultural Resources Council. UA Little Rock placed the restored mural on permanent display at UA Little Rock Downtown in 2018, where it’s available for public viewing and group tours.

“The mural is so central to UA Little Rock Downtown’s mission, and we’ve been working towards creating more programming around it,” said Emily Housdan, programming and administrative assistant at UA Little Rock Downtown. “The grant will allow us to achieve this in an engaging and interactive way for the community. The mural focuses on social issues of the time, but Jones also wanted to express hope for a better future. We recognize that history always shapes the present and that we cannot build a better future without exploring and understanding the past.”

If you would like to see the mural, email downtown@ualr.edu for details.