Desert

The four murals by landscape and figure painter Nicolai Cikovsky sharply contrast an infertile, wind-swept landscape in Desert with agricultural opportunities created by the Bureau of Reclamation irrigation initiatives. Apples depicts workers picking fruit, packing it in crates, and loading the crates on a horse-drawn skid. Irrigation depicts farmers working along the irrigation canals that supply water to the grain fields and orchards. Gathering Dates represents workmen in a date grove.

Cikovsky was born in 1894 in Pinsk, Belarus. In the early 1900s, he studied art at the Vilna Art School and the Penza Royal Art School. From 1921 to 1923 he studied at the Moscow High Technical Art Institute. After immigrating to America in 1923, he taught at the Museum of Arts and Crafts in Columbus, Georgia; the St. Paul School of Art; the Art Academy of Cincinnati; the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C.; and the Art Institute of Chicago. Cikovsky exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum’s 1926 International Exhibition of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Glasgow Museum of Art, the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.