The Negro's Contribution in the Social and Cultural Development of America

Millard Sheets was commissioned in 1939 by the U.S. Department of the Interior to depict the four elements: earth, air, fire and water. A series of disagreements over the content and style of his sketches resulted in a change of topic. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes suggested that the mural panels represent the cultural development of African-Americans, focusing on figures working in specifically non-labor roles. Sheets stated in a 1947 letter to Gilbert Stanley Underwood, acting deputy commissioner of the Federal Works Agency Public Buildings Administration: “I have made no attempt to over-dramatize or to treat this series of panels in a purely symbolic manner. I have attempted to state quite simply my high regard for and feeling about the Negro.”

Sheets was born in 1907 in Pomona, California, and attended the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, where he studied with F. Tolles Chamberlin and Clarence Hinkle. Prior to graduating, Sheets was hired by the Chouinard Art Institute to teach watercolor painting while continuing his studies. During the Great Depression, Sheets helped hire artists for the Public Works of Art Project, the first New Deal art program. During World War II, he was an artist-correspondent for Life magazine and the United States Army Air Forces in Burma and India. His major commissions include works for the Detroit Public Library, the Mayo Clinic, dome of the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C., and the Notre Dame University Library.