Rescued mural depicting Alice’s adventures in New York wonderland back on view for first time in decades

“Come Alice! I’ll show you another wonderland—New York,” reads a line of storybook script on the first panel of a 1938 mural, painted by Abram Champanier. “Oh how jolly! We’d love to see it!” she replies, stepping out of the pages of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the beloved children’s book by Lewis Carroll. Joined by the Mad Hatter, the Cheshire Cat and some other curious characters, Alice ventures into a world perhaps even wilder than Wonderland.

In 16 panels collectively titled Alice of Wonderland Visiting New York,this beloved cast was transported to the children’s ward of Gouverneur Hospital in New York’s Lower East Side neighbourhood. Alice and company flew above the Statue of Liberty and recently constructed Empire State Building, squeezed into a crowded subway car (along with a giraffe), sat on the marble lions in front of the main branch of the New York Public Library, watched an animal orchestra at the Central Park Zoo, fished in New York Harbour, parachuted into Coney Island’s Steeplechase Park and more. “After an eventful day the whole merry kit and kaboodle returned to their books,” reads the final panel.

“Champanier recognised the city as a setting for wonder and magic, and Alice as the perfect muse to celebrate that spirit,” writes Stephanie Hill Wilchfort, director of the Museum of the City of New York, in the catalogue for its recently opened exhibition of the mural, Another Wonderland: Abram Champanier’s Alice Mural, which reunites and publicly displays the entire cycle for the first time since 1981 (until 27 September).

In its original location, the whimsical mural offered escapism and a therapeutic atmosphere for the children of the Lower East Side’s mostly immigrant population. An archival photo on view in Another Wonderland captures how Champanier’s panels created an immersive setting that transported the young patients filling the ward’s many rows of beds to a happier place. Commissioned by the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), this was one of 18 WPA murals for a public New York City hospital and is the only surviving example of a WPA mural created for a hospital children’s ward.

For Champanier, who created several murals around New York (including at the Roxy Theater, New York Athletic Club and 1939 World’s Fair), this may have been the most personal since he cast his own jester-like character, Fabzio the Toymaker, as Alice’s tour guide. “He just had this sense of wonder,” the artist’s son, Paul, said in the exhibition catalogue. 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. He eventually moved to Woodstock, where he taught art.

Champanier’s Alice carried out her adventures on the walls of Gouverneur Hospital for decades, but her fate became uncertain in 1978 when a new branch of the hospital was built nearby and the original building was abandoned. When the interior of the children’s ward was marked for a gut renovation that would have destroyed the murals, in 1981, a group of volunteer advocates got together at the eleventh hour and spent four hot August days salvaging 15 out of the 16 panels (one had mysteriously disappeared but is recorded in photographs).

“The City of New York really did not have the capacity to care about or for this mural. [Conservator] Denise [Whitbeck Farancz] has described it as something of a grey area, they just kind of went in and did it,” says Lilly Tuttle, the Museum of the City of New York curator who organised Another Wonderland. “They literally drove up in a VW bus.”

Whitbeck Farancz and her husband, the conservator Alan Farancz, led the charge to save the Alice murals, with encouragement from Andrew Dolkart of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission. They then kept the panels in their conservation studio where they eventually restored five, distributed to hospitals around the city through NYC Health + Hospitals. The remaining panels remained in conservation limbo until 2021, when funding was secured so that their former apprentice, John Lippert, could restore the rest of the cycle.

“Completing this cycle became a priority, both because of its art-historical significance and because it belongs to the patients and communities of the public system it was made for,” says Larissa Trinder, the assistant vice president of NYC Health + Hospitals Arts in Medicine, which was established in 2018 and now stewards a collection of around 8,000 works. After their exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York, the mural panels will be permanently installed at Gouverneur’s location at 227 Madison Street, across three floors of the facility and with several positioned so that they are visible from the street.

“I think that people will respond to the mural on the level of seeing New York as this wonderful, Oz-like fantasy space,” says Tuttle. “I think New Yorkers will respond to that with a sense of pride. But then it is also a reminder about public art and the role that art has to play in enriching our humanity, and the role of art in healthcare settings.”

• Another Wonderland: Abram Champanier’s Alice Mural, until 27 September, Museum of the City of New York