Samuel Gompers High School

Mission

To provide the means for intellectual, emotional, ethical, social, and physical growth and an appreciation for cultural and ethnic diversity: to teach all regular education, special education, and bilingual students how to learn, to provide technical skills, and to foster in each student the desire for lifelong learning. This will assist every individual to become an informed and productive participant in our democratic society.

Public art

Samuel Gompers High School is the site for a notable Federal Art Project mural created in 1936 by Eric Mose. The three-panel, 600-square-foot fresco, Power, was created in the school library. The work was described in an April 1938 article in The New York Times:

The central theme of this mural is Light. The artist of two decades ago probably would have pictured light as a Greek lady with a torch, or possibly as Prometheus. Mose, however, has combined cubism with physics. The central "figure" is a stylized abstraction of the sun, seen in design with a prism, which relates to a broad band of color that runs along the top of the mural and is broken up into brilliant stripes—the spectrum.

Beneath this field the artist has made an abstract design of the forms through which we know light and power. One recognizes spark-plugs, dynamos and such actual electrical machines as a fan. Those forms are all carried out in color-design derived from the spectrum above, and interestingly applied to individual objects such as infra-red, violet ray and other "light" instruments.