In 1938 the WPA Federal Art Project cut the Grand Canyon into five screens of flat, unblended ink — a turquoise sky, an ochre rim, terracotta walls dropping through rust and mauve to a shadowed river. No gradients, no photography: every canyon stratum is its own printed layer, every edge a knife-clean boundary where one squeegee pass ends and the next begins.

Over the strata sits ranger-station lettering — condensed, all-caps, monumental, the routed wood of a park entrance board — and a single imperative verb. This is the republic's grandeur made public and cheap: one canyon, five screens, printed for every citizen and tacked to a train-station wall.