See the Rescued and Restored ‘Alice in Wonderland’ Mural Painted for Sick Children at a New York Hospital

Abram Champanier’s “Alice of Wonderland Visiting New York” was a commission from the Federal Art Project, a New Deal program that championed American art in public spaces

Sonja Anderson | Daily Correspondent

June 4, 2026 4:24 p.m.

Share

Copy linkEmailSMSFacebookXRedditLinkedInBlueskyPrint

Add as preferred source

In 1940, the children’s ward of Gouverneur Hospital in Manhattan became Wonderland. Artist Abram Champanier had painted a fantastical mural for its walls, commissioned by the Federal Art Project. Titled Alice of Wonderland Visiting New York, the mural imagined Lewis Carroll’s iconic character exploring the city.

In 16 panels of vivid color, Champanier showed Alice, the White Rabbit and the Mad Hatter flying over the Empire State Building, boarding a crowded subway, strolling Central Park and more.

“What could be more New York than this hodgepodge crew crashing the city?” Lilly Tuttle, curator at the Museum of the City of New York, tells the New York Times’ Hilarie M. Sheets. Tuttle says Champanier designed the mural to help sick children transport themselves out of the ward through imagination. “For viewers today, the mural is a reminder of what federal funding for the arts could do for cities like New York and how public art could inject light and energy into unexpected spaces.”

Soon, visitors to the Museum of the City of New York will be able to see Champanier’s work for themselves. The exhibition “Another Wonderland: Abram Champanier’s Alice Mural” includes all 16 panels of the mural—rescued, restored and replicated over decades.

Champanier was born in Russia in 1896, and his family immigrated to New Jersey when he was 9 years old. As a young man, he studied at the Art Students League, joining the artistic generation of Alexander Calder and Edward Hopper. Champanier made a career as a muralist, painting in a unique style he called “Staccatoism,” according to a statement from the museum.

In 1935, Champanier won the Gouverneur Hospital commission from the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration—a Depression-era New Deal program through which the U.S. government funded the creation of visual arts. The project commissioned art by the likes of Jackson Pollack, Lee Krasner, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning. According to Brooklyn College, it funded some 2,500 public murals, 108,000 easel paintings, 19,000 sculptures and 36,000 posters.

Champanier began painting his Alice mural in 1938, on panels more than seven feet tall. In 1940, the canvases were installed in the children’s ward—fused to the walls with lead paste. There they stayed until the hospital lost accreditation in 1961. The building, abandoned in 1978, fell into disrepair. It was then that Andrew S. Dolkart of the Landmarks Preservation Commission discovered the forgotten paintings in the children’s ward.

“The room was a ruin,” Dolkart, an architectural historian, tells the Times. But the Champanier’s panels were “witty and fun and bright, and even in that abandoned space you could tell that they were pretty wonderful and shouldn’t be just torn down.”

Yet, he adds, “The city had no interest in the mural.”

Dolkart enlisted conservators Alan and Denise Farancz, who had experience extracting wall art. In 1981—as the hospital was being demolished—the team extracted Champanier’s work from the ward’s walls. Over the next four decades, a morphing team slowly cleaned and conserved the panels. In 2008, they entered the care of restorers John Lippert and Dawn D’Aluisio, who created replicas of lost panels: scenes of a fishing boat and the Statue of Liberty.

The new exhibition contains the mural panels framed individually as well as information about Champanier and the therapeutic usage of art. The mural was, after all, one installation in a wave of Depression-era hospital art—designed to uplift, amuse and interest ailing patients. As the Times reports, Alice of Wonderland Visiting New York is the only surviving Works Progress Administration commission for a children’s hospital ward.

“It was really a gift to the kids who were in the hospital when there was no TV, no iPads, no video games and they needed something to keep them entertained and pass the time,” Tuttle tells NY1’s Roger Clark.

After the exhibition, the murals will be installed at NYC Health + Hospitals Gouverneur—a 295-bed nursing facility on the Lower East Side—reports NY1. As Tuttle says in the statement, bringing the murals back to the public “after decades in obscurity has been a profound curatorial journey.”

“These works are not only visually stunning, they’re a testament to the belief that art can uplift, inspire, and heal,” Tuttle says. “Through this exhibition, we honor a moment in New York’s history when public investment in the arts transformed civic spaces and enriched the lives of everyday New Yorkers—including the city’s youngest and most vulnerable patients.”

“Another Wonderland: Abram Champanier’s Alice Mural” will be on view at the Museum of the City of New York from June 6 through September.

Sonja Anderson | Read More

Sonja Anderson is a daily correspondent for Smithsonian magazine who covers art, archaeology and culture, from newly discovered artifacts to the latest art heists.