Beloved Leo’s Mural Has Resurfaced!

And for the right price, “What’ll It Be?” can be all yours. While few people will remember that title, anyone who ever stepped foot inside Leo’s will recognize this image instantly. John Rector’s pioneering bar and restaurant opened in 1974, closing two decades later. The place featured much original artwork by talented locals. This enormous painting by RISD alum and Leo’s bartender, Dan Gosch, loomed over the front room. But when Leo’s closed in 1994, the new owners took possession of all the furnishings, including the artwork, and subsequently auctioned it all off. And that’s where Edward Rashed comes in; he purchased the piece in 1994 and still owns it. In the lower left hand corner one can find the artist’s signature with the date “Sept 9, 74.” It is the mural’s 50th anniversary and Ed thinks it’s time for the work to come out of the shadows and into our lives once again, adding, “Make me an offer!”

I first wrote about all this when parts of the other monumental Gosch work, a gallery of square portraits which adorned the back area in Leo’s, surfaced in a local exhibition. In that post, I pleaded with the cosmos, “Whatever happened to the giant mural?” Mr. Rashed bumped into that post recently and got in touch. He has owned the mural from day one and believes it is time for it to come out of storage and be viewed and enjoyed, hopefully somewhere around town. (Private collectors are certainly welcome to make an offer. He just hopes that this piece of Providence history can find its way back into the public sphere somehow.)

So let’s get the specs out of the way, and then some history:

The dimensions: 20’6″ long and between 5′-6′ high. This photo shows the painting when it was last in a storage unit. But in 2020 Rashed removed it from the frame and rolled it up; Mr. Gosch gave some guidance on this procedure. “I removed the staples and Dan told me how to roll it up. It’s rolled around a 5″ pvc tube. It’s been in storage for about 3 or 4 years, I have a dehumidifier. It’s not getting moldy or anything.” Rashed has kept all that original framing, but it is in a few pieces. Some damage to the painting is visible (discussed below).

Mr Rashed believes “a reasonably strong person could lift it alone, at somewhere around 60-70 lbs., I’d guess. But it’s awkward because it’s 8’ long rolled up, and you have to handle with care! Definitely easier for two.”

The medium is oil-on-canvas, which I confirmed with Gosch, who answered my questions via email. He added this tidbit:

In regards to the “very big piece of canvas” I had to get it from Pease Awning Co in Warwick as none of the art stores carried fabric that wide. As I remember it the awning canvas was heavy and a bitch to stretch on that huge frame. Just checked and Pease is still in business.

As to the damage: Visible on the redhead at the bottom middle of the image is a rip caused by a forklift driver at a time when it was being stored in a friend’s warehouse. To her left is a muscle-bound guy with brown streaks running down. (It almost looks like part of the image. . . like he is having beer poured on his head.) Ed thinks this happened very early on when the painting was first being stored in the Leo’s basement.

The history of the mural:

Shortly after Leo’s closed in 1994, the new owners held an auction of the furnishings. Rashed found himself bidding against (current RI Senator) Josh Miller, and $5,000 later, Ed ended up in possession of the mural. These two were on friendly terms and an arrangement was made for Josh to move the mural over to his Trinity Brewhouse on Fountain Street, where it remained for a couple of years.

At some point, the mural found a new home hanging over the bar at The Met, the one on Union and Fulton Streets, connected to Lupo’s. (We are taking Ed’s word for this as neither Mr. Lupo nor myself — and I spent as much time there as he did — can quite remember this.) By the late nineties the enormous mural was being moved around to a variety of storage situations, until finally in December of 2020 (at the time this photo was taken) when it was taken off the stretchers and moved down to South County to live with Mr. Rashed.

Mr. Rashed hopes that someone can take this mural and exhibit it where the public can visit it. That could be another bar, a museum, a gallery, an academic institution, an office building, or a corporate headquarters with a big wall to fill. Again, private collectors are certainly welcome to contact Mr. Rashed. And while I would like to help make this happen, I can not help with any inquiries or negotiations that might arise from this piece. Do not direct your questions to us here at The Dose!

Please direct all inquiries to Edward Rashed at squeakyfeet@cox.net. And I agree with Ed:

“Such a fun piece of work. Storage is not where it was meant to be. It’s been too long.”

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Who is Edward Rashed? I had a coffee with Ed a week ago down in Wakefield where we tried to remember if we knew each other. We came up blank, but you may remember Rashed from the good old days when he was very much involved with the Providence music and theater scene including the RI Shakespeare Theater, Alias Stage,  and Trinity Rep. He played in a couple of bands including the Shamblers, Kingsnake, Bop-A-Gon, and another called Tanoose, a nod to his Lebanese heritage and “Make Room for Daddy.” He currently plays with ((((The Repercussions)))).

Ed was also the musical director and pit musician for the statewide school dance program Chance to Dance who often performed at PPAC. He is currently the music director at St. Mary’s Star of the Sea and plays piano in clubs around the area.

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Dan Gosch still works and exhibits in the southern New England area. While he and Mr. Rashed have communicated occasionally over the years about the care and feeding of the mural, Mr. Gosch is not among those anxious to see it again, having been forced to stare at it night after night during all those years of bartending. I think we can all understand that . . . but we all want to see it again.

So who were those people in the mural? I referred back to this interview conducted by a student in the Brown Humanities Department for an oral history class investigating the arts in 20th-century RI. The interviews and supporting materials they collected provided the raw materials for an exhibit at the Providence Historical Society. In 2003 they interviewed Leo’s owner, and Brown alum, John Rector, and here is his answer to that question (lightly edited):

Probably the most distinctive feature of Leo’s was a 19-foot painting done by Dan Gosch, called “What’ll It Be?”  It was basically a picture of a bunch of people in a bar. And it was a very wide range of people . . . there were a pair of elderly twin sisters eating hotdogs. Most all the images were from magazine advertisements. Actually there was only one real person in the entire thing. And it turned out to be Royal Little, who was the founder of Textron.

That’s Providence for ya.

[Additional note: Having just read this piece, Mr. Gosch wanted to clarify the part of the above quote which indicated that most of the people were taken from magazine advertisements. Says Gosch, “A few, sure, but the bulk of them were my own creations.” And he confirmed that the bald man was Royal Little, “but I had no idea who he was at the time, just used what I thought was a random picture of a bald guy for reference.”]

I want to thank Mr. Gosch and Mr. Lupo for their help in this. We all did our best, but this was a long time ago.

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From 2020.