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Rockwell Kent
Mail Service in the Arctic, 1937
Mail Service in the Tropics, 1937
At the turn of the twentieth century, the district of Alaska and the Puerto Rico territory represented the breadth of the US Post Office Department's mail service.
An avid traveler, Rockwell Kent was a natural choice to depict the importance of the post in these two far-flung locales. Mail Service in the Arctic centers on a group of native Alaskans as they bid farewell to a mail plane after transferring parcels and letters to dog sleds for delivery to their final destinations. Mail Service in the Tropics likewise depicts a group of native Puerto Ricans gladly accepting the mail brought by air. This mural stirred great controversy on its debut, due to the test of the letter that the postman delivers to the four women. In the little-known Kurkokwim dialect, Kent inscribed a fictional message from Alaska to Puerto Rico. Translated, it reads "To the people of Puerto Rico, our friends ! Go ahead, let us change chiefs. That alone can make us equal and free." During a time of political unrest in Puerto Rico, the implication of such revolutionary sentiments angered both Americans and Alaskans. Some Puerto Ricans objected to the inclusion of only dark-skinned figures as representative of the island's entire population. After much public debate, and several offers by Kent to revise the mural, no consensus could be reached and so the painting remained unchanged. |