County of Monmouth issued the following announcement.
Ben and Bernarda Shahn House and Studio, #Roosevelt
Ben Shahn (1898-1969) was an American artist known for his Social Realist paintings, murals, and photographs. Employed by the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression, he was commissioned to complete a fresco mural for the school in the New Deal planned community of Jersey Homesteads, renamed Roosevelt in 1945 after FDR’s death. Created wholesale from two square miles of western Monmouth County farmland, Jersey Homesteads was part of a federal program in the 1930s to resettle people from low-income urban areas to the countryside, where they would improve their standard of living by working in relocated local industry, aided by subsistence farming. Many of the first settlers were Jewish garment workers from New York City. The new town’s origins and appearance were different than any other town in Monmouth County. The modernist Bauhaus-influenced buildings, designed by Louis Kahn, appeared quite futuristic in the 1930s, but were appropriate to the experimental nature of the community. Shahn’s mural depicts the town’s founding within the larger theme of immigrants’ hardships and advancements in America. He said that the mural was among his most successful works: “People really look at it. They know it by heart. To them, it’s like the building, a part of the community.” Ben Shahn and his wife Bernarda Bryson Shahn, also an artist who worked on the mural, soon made the town their life-long home and attracted other notable artists to settle there. In the 1960s, the Shahns built a second story addition designed by the renowned Japanese-American furniture designer and architect George Nakashima (1905-1990).
Source: The #MonmouthCountyArchives’ “Buildings in Monmouth: Stories and Styles” Catalog: https://www.monmouthcountyclerk.com/…/exhibit-catalogs…/
Original source can be found here.
