MCAS Practice Test 15

Text 1: “Art for the Post Office” by Isabel Delgado

¹In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, the United States government became one of the largest employers of artists in the country's history. Several federal programs paid painters, sculptors, writers, and musicians to create work for the public. One of the most lasting of these efforts was run by the Treasury Department, which decorated new federal buildings—especially post offices—with art.

²Between 1934 and 1943, the Treasury's art program commissioned more than a thousand murals for post offices in towns large and small. Artists were often chosen through competitions in which their names were hidden from the judges, so that the work, not the artist's reputation, would decide the winner. Many winners were young and unknown. For some, a post office mural was the first paid commission of their careers.

³The program had a clear idea of what the murals should be. Officials encouraged artists to show scenes connected to the town where the post office stood: local industries, landscapes, and moments from regional history. A town known for its orchards might receive a harvest scene; a river town, a painting of barges and docks. The goal was art that ordinary people would recognize as their own.

⁴That goal was not always met. Residents sometimes objected that an artist from far away had gotten their town wrong—painting the wrong crops, or portraying local people in ways they found inaccurate or unflattering. Artists were often asked to revise their designs in response. The back-and-forth could be frustrating, but it also meant that people in small towns were invited to have opinions about public art.

⁵Many of these murals still hang in post offices today. Others have been moved, damaged, or lost. Where they survive, they offer a picture of how Americans in the 1930s saw their communities—or how artists imagined they did.

Text 2: “Keeping Walls Alive” by Kofi Bramwell

¹An outdoor mural faces challenges that a painting in a museum never will. Sunlight fades its colors. Rain and snow seep into the wall behind it. In cold climates, water that soaks into brick or concrete can freeze and expand, pushing paint away from the surface. Car exhaust, dust, and graffiti add their own damage. A mural that looks brilliant on the day it is finished may look tired in ten years and ruined in thirty.

²Conservators (specialists who care for works of art) have developed ways to slow this process. The first step comes before any paint is applied: preparing the wall. A cracked or damp surface will fail no matter how good the paint is, so conservators often recommend repairing and sealing a wall first. The choice of paint matters too. Some paints made for outdoor use resist fading far better than ordinary house paint.

³After a mural is finished, many cities apply a clear protective coating. Some coatings block part of the sun's ultraviolet light, which breaks down color. Others are designed so that graffiti can be removed without harming the painting underneath. These coatings do not last forever; they must be reapplied every few years.

⁴“People think of a mural as finished when the artist puts down the brush,” says Evangeline Archuleta, a conservator who has restored dozens of public murals. “It's really the beginning of a long relationship. A mural needs checkups, the way a person does.”

⁵Even with care, every outdoor mural eventually reaches a point where it must be restored, repainted, or allowed to fade. Those decisions raise difficult questions. If the artist has died, should another painter retouch the work? Should a faded mural be repainted in brighter colors than the original, or left as it is? Conservators generally try to preserve what the original artist made, but communities sometimes prefer a fresh coat to a careful patch.

Text 3: “Whose Wall Is It?” by Leo Fairweather

¹When a faded mural on the side of the Glenhaven public library came up for discussion at a city council meeting last spring, nobody expected a crowd. The mural, painted in 1978 by a group of local high school students and their art teacher, showed the town's old textile mill, a river, and a line of figures holding hands. Decades of weather had reduced it to ghostly shapes.

²The council's proposal was simple: paint over the old mural and commission a new one. A design competition would invite artists from across the state to submit ideas.

³More than eighty residents came to the meeting. Some had been among the students who painted the original. “My handprint is on that wall,” said Doris Ingersoll, now in her sixties. “We weren't professionals, but it was ours.”

⁴Others supported the plan. A younger resident pointed out that the mill had closed long ago and that many people now living in Glenhaven had no connection to it. “A mural should speak to the town we are now,” she said, “not only the town we used to be.”

⁵In the end, the council reached a compromise. The original mural would be recorded in detailed photographs, and one portion of it—the row of figures—would be restored by a conservator. The rest of the wall would go to a new mural, chosen through a competition in which residents would vote on the finalists. Former students from 1978 were invited to serve on the selection committee.

⁶Not everyone was satisfied. But the debate revealed something the council had not expected: for many residents, the wall was not just a surface to decorate. It was a record of who had been allowed to tell the town's story, and a question about who would tell it next.