OROZCO MURALS

José Clemente Orozco first came to Dartmouth for a two- week stay in 1932 under a newly established artist-in-residence program. After catching sight of “the walls of my dreams” in the Baker Reserve Reading Room, Orozco drafted a letter to President Ernest Martin Hopkins, class of 1901, proposing the history of the Americas as the topic for a 14-panel fresco, The Epic of American Civilization. Hopkins agreed, and Orozco spent the next two years on the murals, for which he was paid approximately $7,000. The artist, who lost his left hand to fireworks as a child, relied on assistants and a plasterer to help him create the masterwork, named a national historic landmark in 2013. At right, the Anglo-America portion of the murals that depicts what a Hood Museum brochure describes as a “tall, stern-faced schoolmarm.”