Georgette Seabrooke Powell: I think I was supposed to be 21, I was 18. It didn't make a difference as far as I was concerned, because I – I just felt that I could've lived up to anything that they expected of me, it just didn't make any difference what age it was. And of course the guys were much older, and I was actually the youngest and of course I went about my business, did my artwork and went back home.
Jacqueline Frances: African Americans were virtually invisible. There were people who had had successes, both in the United States and in France, such as Augusta Savage, and others. However, their names might come before the press as a sort of novelty. Imagine this, an African American artist practicing in the United States, winning a prize at the Paris Salon, but then disappearing rather rapidly from the public view. So the WPA was quite a boon, even with the disappointments of perhaps not greater numbers of African American artists on its rolls, and yet still an opportunity to earn a paycheck and do what you desired to do, which was to create art.
Georgette Seabrooke Powell: We're talking about 1935. And we're talking about my determination to earn money through my art in some way. Prior to that the summer, in the summer, my friend and I we were looking for summer jobs, there just weren't any summer jobs, nothing around at all. We even had appointments down at the NAACP and so forth. My mother had to work as a domestic, and I thought that would be great if I would be able to have a little salary. I had met Augusta Savage, who was really, really great on helping young artists. And that's how my interest began.
Jacqueline Frances: In general murals are magnificent projects for any artist. It is having an opportunity to work on the grandest public scale. And for the African American artists who were participating in the Harlem Hospital project it was an achievement of unbelievable and hard to measure in terms of the honor of doing such a thing.
Many artists wanted mural commissions during the 1930s, black and nonblack. Not everyone got them. Jacob Lawrence famously said that he wanted to paint a mural in the 1930s, but was told that he was too young for a wall. So it's quite interesting actually for an African American artist, such as the young woman, the 20-year-old Georgette Seabrooke, to get this commission, and a great honor and a great measure of their reputation and their skills in the 1930s that so many African American artists would be involved in the Harlem Hospital project.