Abram Champanier’s Alice mural returns to New York after decades in storage
A 1938 mural cycle made for a hospital children’s ward has reemerged in full public view, offering a rare look at how New Deal-era art once shaped the atmosphere of care. “Another Wonderland: Abram Champanier’s Alice Mural” at the Museum of the City of New York reunites “Alice of Wonderland Visiting New York,” a 16-panel work that has not been publicly shown in its entirety since 1981.
Commissioned for Gouverneur Hospital on the Lower East Side, the mural places Lewis Carroll’s Alice, the Mad Hatter, the Cheshire Cat, and other figures in a briskly imagined New York. Across the panels, the group passes the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, the New York Public Library, Central Park Zoo, New York Harbour, and Coney Island’s Steeplechase Park. The final scene sends the characters back to their books after their day in the city.
The exhibition, on view through 27 September, underscores the mural’s original purpose as more than decoration. In the children’s ward, it was intended to soften a clinical environment for young patients, many of them from the neighborhood’s immigrant families. The work is also the only surviving WPA mural created for a hospital children’s ward, which gives it unusual historical weight within the broader legacy of Federal Art Project commissions.
Champanier, a Jewish immigrant from Russian Poland who arrived at Ellis Island in 1905, studied at the Art Students League with Kenneth Hayes Miller and was part of the Whitney Studio Club before moving to Woodstock, where he taught art. He also painted murals at the Roxy Theater, the New York Athletic Club, and the 1939 World’s Fair, but this cycle may be the most intimate. His son, Paul, has said the artist had “this sense of wonder,” and that quality is visible in the way the city becomes a stage for play rather than spectacle.
The mural’s survival was far from assured. In 1981, when a planned gut renovation threatened the original ward, volunteers salvaged 15 of the 16 panels over four August days. One panel had disappeared, though it survives in photographs. Conservators Denise Whitbeck Farancz and Alan Farancz led the rescue effort, with support from Andrew Dolkart of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission.
After the museum presentation closes, the panels are scheduled to be permanently installed at Gouverneur Hospital, at 227 Madison Street. The return closes a long loop between public art, healthcare, and the city that first inspired Champanier’s vision.
