A major challenge in the field of education is to ensure that our technological society is open to the talents of those of every race and every social or economic stratum. Benton's recognition of that challenge, at his earlier moment in our history, is evident in City Building, the concluding panel in his mural cycle for the New School of Social Research. This portrayal of the excavation stage of building includes, at the left, a monumental image of a raciallymixed work crew a bold image indeed for 1930, when prejudice still excluded blacks from most union locals. Building Common Laborers was one of the few unions that accepted black members.
With T. P. Ready's essay on Project 3000 by 2000, which aims to increase minority representation in medical education, we include a contemporary image that leads us into a child's experience of healing in one kind of Hispanic context. Carmen Lomas Garza's Curandera (Healer), which we reproduce with its accompanying explanatory text in both English and Spanish, comes from her book, Family Pictures. This book, which is designed for children, often reflects Lomas Garza's own early experience. It was brought to our attention by Manuel N. Gsmez of our Editorial Board.
Relating also to the theme of minorities in education is the image we reproduce with Thomas W. Payzant's essay on the Goals 2000 Educate America Act and the Improving America's Schools Act. This painting, titled Playground (Recess), is by the African American artist, Archibald J. Motley, Jr. Suggesting children's art in its naive perspective, high horizon, and linear treatment of the figures, it evokes the energy of playground life and also portrays the interracial harmony that is possible there. The painting is a study for Motley's mural project of about 1940 for the Doolittle School on East 35th Street in Chicago. Like much of the art sponsored by the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration, those murals have since been covered over or destroyed. This painting is now in the collection of African American art established by Harriet O. Kelley and her husband Harmon Kelley, M.D., an obstetrician and gynecologist. The Kelley's entire collection will be shown at the Smithsonian Institution from April 23 to the end of August in 1995. With Playground we include some comments by Harriet O. Kelley that appeared in a recent issue of JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association (June 15, 1994).
On the back cover, to accompany the essays on partnerships with business by Edward Kisailus, Thomas Persing, and Thomas Furtado, we have reproduced Charles Demuth's painting of 1921, Business. No doubt the regular grid, the calendar, and the dominating digits in this painting suggest an impersonal world of office work. But Demuth has here transfigured that world through an asymmetrical composition, some unpredictably angled and shadowy reflections of buildings, and refreshing delicacies of tint. We can here discern the creative human factor the basis for all our optimism about the world of work not in the explicit "subject" of the painting but in the artist's subtle rendering of its motifs.