No fooling. Sometimes, one has to return to the beginning. Sort of like when you’ve lost something — it’s always a good idea to, when you feel you’re out of places to search, look again in the first place you looked. So it is with the women of post office muraldom (I just made up that word). Alphabetically by state and town, the first mural is The Letter Box in Atmore, Alabama, and it was made by the artist and women’s rights advocate Anne Goldthwaite. I was surprised to find that I hadn’t yet written about her here, though I do admit that I have learned to look harder to find inspiration among muralists over the past few months. It is not that the art is bad or uninteresting, it’s that sometimes one has to try hard to find the sketchiness in it.

A pretty large number of Goldthwaite’s works can be seen online at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Johnson Collection, the MoMA, the Met, and the Whitney.

Goldthwaite painted a second mural: The Road to Tuskegee (Tuskegee, Alabama).