The Pacific Northwest is still burning. Portland is still not. Air quality is still rated “hazardous.” The fires were still not caused by activists. The list of post office muralists is still long.

I’ve skipped over several (in alphabetical order by mural state and city) muralists because their art wasn’t very inspiring to me. There are those with a deep love for paintings of “cowboys and indians,” (I won’t call them First Nations or Native Americans because the depictions are romanticized and often offensive) but I am not one. Attractions don’t lie. I confess. I am drawn to social realism (less Grant Wood more Thomas Hart Benton) and I’ve always like abstract expressionism.

Which brings us to Seymour Fogel. As with the rest of the muralists I’ve covered, I had not heard of Mr. Fogel prior to the COVID Card project. If he was covered in an art history class I had in college, the knowledge is tucked far, far back in my brain where it is buried under a couple of decades worth of crap.

Fogel painted the History of the Gila Valley, a series of 6 murals, for the Safford, Arizona post office. He also painted murals for the World’s Fair in New York and the Department of Health and Human Services.