New York City's public hospital system has finished restoring three Depression-era murals and a sculpture at Harlem Hospital, works created under the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project. The Arts in Medicine department of NYC Health + Hospitals announced the completion of the conservation work on Wednesday, October 14, returning the pieces — housed in the hospital's indoor mural pavilion — to their original appearance.

The restored works are Charles Alston's two companion murals, "Magic in Medicine" (1940) and "Modern Medicine" (1940), which flank Vertis Hayes's larger eight-panel cycle, "Pursuit of Happiness" (1937), in the pavilion. They date from a period when Black artists won unprecedented access to major public commissions, and they rank among the most significant surviving examples of federally funded Black art inside a public institution.

The murals carry a charged history. When Hayes submitted his designs in 1936, hospital administrators objected that they contained "too much black subject matter." The artists protested the verdict publicly, and the hospital commissioner reversed the decision — an early test of whether federally supported public art could depict Black life on its own terms.

Larissa Trinder, who heads the Arts in Medicine program, told Hyperallergic the project restores the works to their original state. For the patients, staff and visitors who pass through the mural pavilion each day, the conservation restores the full legibility of paintings made to be seen by the public. Nearly nine decades after they were painted, the murals — along with the John Rhoden sculpture included in the effort — stand as a record of both the art itself and the fight to keep it visible.