In 2012, Betty Woodman was commissioned to create an artwork for the Christopher S. Bond courthouse in Jefferson City, Missouri, through the General Services Administration’s Art in Architecture program. She created wall murals made up of three painted canvases with ceramic elements—River View: Sunshine, River View: Day Dreaming, and River View: Vases at Dusk—situated next to the windows above the brightly lit atrium. Each painted panel suggests an image of a window, evokes classical imagery with vase motifs, and echoes the seasons through vibrant (Day Dreaming) and muted (Vases at Dusk) color palettes. The ceramic forms were Woodman’s response to the courthouse’s columns, which themselves reference Missouri’s State Capitol and Thomas Jefferson’s Palladian Monticello.

The murals’ water elements, seen through the “windows,” were not only inspired by the building’s close proximity to the storied and ecologically significant Missouri River, but also by the medallion embedded in the terrazzo floor—which bears the Great Seal of the United States alongside the phrase “Let Justice Flow Like a River.” Woodman also drew influence from Missouri’s rich public art tradition, particularly Thomas Hart Benton’s mural A Social History of the State of Missouri. She wrote: “[W]hen I saw the incredibly rich paintings of [Benton] on the interior of the State House with their scale and color and monumentality, I felt I had been given license to cover the whole walls, to use color and metaphor. The people who live in and come to Jefferson City expect an august building to contain this experience.”