Flat Blue Fish, Panel #26: The Paint Can and the Women Behind San Francisco's Aquatic Park Murals

The paint can and its label, from the late-1930s lobby murals of the Aquatic Park Bathhouse. NPS Photo/Anna Christie. SAFR 20298

In 2003, five cans turned up in the basement of the Sala Burton Building — the Maritime Museum in San Francisco. One stands out: an old, rusty cat food can with blue paint dried inside and a pencilled label on the side, "Flat Blue Fish, Panel #26." Park staff worked out that the cans had been used to mix and apply paint for the sea-themed murals painted in the late 1930s in the lobby of what was then the Aquatic Park Bathhouse. The label names the exact panel and the subject.

Who painted the fish?

The muralists were employed by the Federal Art Project, the visual arts branch of the New Deal's Works Progress Administration (WPA). As a relief program during the Great Depression, it hired more than 10,000 artists to make public art, with few restrictions. The WPA's own 1938 report held such projects essential to keeping up the "collective spirit" of the San Francisco community. Women took part — but the men who directed the projects have overshadowed them, and the Bathhouse murals are no exception.

Two women may have used the blue paint:

One of the Bathhouse murals, with flat blue fish at the top. "There is no sense of division between the sea, the buildings, the decorations — all seem as one, the perfect blend," a 1940 WPA report said — though hundreds of workers made it. NPS Photo/Anna Christie

A palace for the people

According to a WPA progress report, Aquatic Park was little more than a San Francisco dream until the WPA brought the "man power and money." At its center stood the Bathhouse, built to look like a great white ocean liner. Local newspapers and the WPA called it "A Palace for the People": a public building for swimmers.

The Aquatic Park Bathhouse opened to the public in 1939. NPS Photo/Anna Christie

It did not stay a palace for the people for long.

Color and harmony

Hardened blue paint at the bottom of the can — what is left of the fish's color. NPS Photo/Anna Christie

The blue residue is the most exciting part of the find. The lobby murals' art director and designer, Hilaire Hiler, was obsessed with color: he believed it worked on the mind as well as the eye, and he sought harmonious combinations. Most San Francisco WPA murals are social realism, scenes of everyday life in the Depression. Hiler's are surreal — imagined worlds under the sea in bright, eye-catching colors. Life under the sea, as he put it, is organic, without a single straight line.

Ann Medalie, the "queen of fish," adding color to a sea plant on one of the lobby murals. NPS Collections, SAFR 21374

Hiler has taken most of the credit, but his assistant Ann Medalie was crucial to bringing the murals to life with her skill in metallic paints. Shirley Triest worked mainly on the Bathhouse's third floor, under Richard Ayer, but probably painted in the lobby too. She later recalled that artists from different floors mixed freely, swapping jobs and working side by side — a pleasant, easy-going workplace that matched the harmony Hiler wanted in his palette.

Bohemian San Francisco

The mixing carried on after work.

• Both women lived for a time in "The Monkey Block", an affordable refuge for artists during the Depression.
• They unwound at the Black Cat Café, which Triest remembered as the center of everything, talking art, politics and work.
• At union meetings they swapped news of WPA jobs with other artists.

The scene welcomed communists, anarchists, pacifists, lesbians and gay men, among others. Its openness, cooperation and compassion were real — but, as Triest pointed out, they also grew out of financial need.

What the Federal Art Project changed

• Before the New Deal, art was mostly a luxury commodity, and artists often worked alone and without money.
• By paying artists in large numbers, the project let them put food on the table and also work with and inspire one another; they became professionals making a real contribution to American life.
• By paying women, at a time when most funding and benefits went to male breadwinners and pushed women toward the home or low-paid domestic work, it let them become respected wage earners on a par with men.

After the WPA, Medalie traveled the world to artists' communities, enriching her work. Triest never left California, but stayed open to radical political and social ideas and to new styles of art. For artists like them, home was a creative space where blue fish could shimmer, and a community that valued art in public places. That world did not survive the economic recovery. The murals did.

Sources

Based on "Mysterious Paint Can of San Francisco's Maritime Museum," by Nicole Martin, PhD, in the series Home and Homelands Exhibition: Resistance, National Park Service, made possible in part by a grant from the National Park Foundation; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The article draws on the WPA's Report on Progress of the Works Program in San Francisco (1938) and Four Years of Achievement Under the Federal Work Program of Northern California (1940); Shirley Staschen Triest's oral histories for the Archives of American Art (1964) and the Bancroft Library's Regional Oral History Office (1995–1996); Sabrina Oliveros's Hilaire Hiler Podcast Series (NPS, 2020); and Linda Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled (1995). Triest's and Hiler's words are paraphrased here; rewritten in hubnx's own words.