Arizona Elementary School Asks Mural Artists To Make Faces “Lighter In Color”

by Doug Mataconis

Seriously, this is not good press Arizona:
A group of artists has been asked to lighten the faces of children depicted in a giant public mural at a Prescott school.


The project’s leader says he was ordered to lighten the skin tone after complaints about the children’s ethnicity. But the school’s principal says the request was only to fix shading and had nothing to do with political pressure.



The “Go on Green” mural, which covers two walls outside Miller Valley Elementary School, was designed to advertise a campaign for environmentally friendly transportation. It features portraits of four children, with a Hispanic boy as the dominant figure.



R.E. Wall, director of Prescott’s Downtown Mural Project, said he and other artists were subjected to slurs from motorists as they worked on the painting at one of the town’s most prominent intersections.



“We consistently, for two months, had people shouting racial slander from their cars,” Wall said. “We had children painting with us, and here come these yells of (epithet for Blacks) and (epithet for Hispanics).”



Wall said school Principal Jeff Lane pressed him to make the children’s faces appear happier and brighter.



“It is being lightened because of the controversy,” Wall said, adding that “they want it to look like the children are coming into light.”



Lane said that he received only three complaints about the mural and that his request for a touch-up had nothing to do with political pressure. “We asked them to fix the shading on the children’s faces,” he said. “We were looking at it from an artistic view. Nothing at all to do with race.”



Yes, sure, I’m supposed to believe that a school principal was giving artistic direction. To the professional artists that were hired to paint the mural, and that there was nothing else going on here:

City Councilman Steve Blair spearheaded a public campaign on his talk show at Prescott radio station KYCA-AM (1490) to remove the mural.



In a broadcast last month, according to the Daily Courier in Prescott, Blair mistakenly complained that the most prominent child in the painting is African-American, saying: “To depict the biggest picture on the building as a Black person, I would have to ask the question: Why?”



You know, Arizona stuff like this isn’t going to help convince people that there isn’t some weird racial thing going on in your state.