By JOSEPH DE AVILA

Michele Wallace had worked for Medialink Worldwide Inc. for 18 years when the New York video-distribution company laid her off last May. When the company’s information-technology staff quickly shut down her computer and her BlackBerry, the senior vice president of client services lost family photos and every personal and business contact on her cellphone and computer.

“I couldn’t even call my sister because I don’t know her number off the top of my head,” says Ms. Wallace, now a 47-year-old managing director at Mega Media Worldwide and living in Asbury Park, N.J. “I know you shouldn’t even have that stuff on the computer,” she says. But in the course of working 10- to 12-hour days for several years, “you don’t pay as much attention as to how much is personal on your computer.”

She’s still piecing together her contacts on Facebook and LinkedIn. (Medialink did not return calls for comment.)

As layoffs sweep across industries, employees’ personal information is winding up in the dustbin, as well. Most workers know better than to store personal files on their office computer. But employees who spend the majority of their time at the office often treat the company PC as their personal gadget, filling it with music, photos, personal contacts — even using the computer’s calendar to track a child’s soccer schedule. That makes it all the more distressing when a newly laid-off worker learns that his digital belongings are company property.

Most companies today have new hires sign electronic communications policies that generally state they have no rights to privacy or rights of ownership over the content on company computers. It doesn’t matter if those files are wedding photos or family phone numbers. “It still belongs to the company if it’s stored on a company-issued computer,” says Allison Brecher, director of information management and strategy and senior litigation counsel at consultants Marsh & McLennan Cos.

After someone quits or is laid off, a company will typically just delete those files, wiping a computer clean. In professions where communication between clients is important, like in sales or finance, companies might keep email correspondence for their records, says Jonathan Hyman, a partner at law firm Kohrman Jackson & Krantz PLL in Cleveland.

Earlier this year, Katie Morse was caught off-guard when she was laid off from a telecommunications company in Charlotte, N.C., where she worked in the marketing and communication department. After filling out paperwork and being briefed by her supervisors, she was escorted to her desk to collect her things. “Anything that was on my computer I didn’t have access to,” Ms. Morse, now living in Brooklyn, N.Y., says. “I honestly wish I was able to take my contacts with me.”

Companies often lock down computers and restrict access to email as soon as an employee is let go. “That could vary, but I think it’s safer to expect a harsh response,” says Janine Yancey, chief executive for emTRAiN, a human-resource training company.

Whether laid-off workers are allowed to retrieve personal files depends on the industry and the size of the business. “If you go into a bigger organization, they are going to implement a standard across the board,” which tends to be more restrictive, Ms. Yancey says. Smaller organizations may be more lenient. Some professions — brokers or financial advisers, for example — may be constrained by regulatory requirements with regards to the access they can give laid-off workers, Ms. Brecher says.

Companies often go to extreme lengths to protect themselves during layoffs. Some pore over their former employees’ emails, says Mr. Hyman. “If they think an employee has stolen anything, they will look for that,” he says. Companies fearing lawsuits from disgruntled former employees may have their IT department or an outside firm search through the emails, too, Mr. Hyman says.

From a business standpoint, companies that give laid-off workers access to work computers and email risk exposure to data theft, computer viruses and lost contact lists. “You don’t want somebody going in and downloading their whole contact base,” Ms. Yancey says. “That contact base belongs to the employer.”

A recent survey by the Ponemon Institute, a privacy research group in Traverse City, Mich., found that nearly 60% of employees who lost or left jobs in 2008 stole company data. The survey polled 945 adults from several industries who were laid off, fired or changed jobs in 2008. Data that was taken included non-financial business information, customer contact lists and financial information.

While human resource consultants advise businesses to use caution when dealing with laid-off employees, some are more lenient. Michelle Liro had five weeks’ notice that she was being let go as director of marketing at a telecommunications company. This gave her time to hunt for a new job and move email contacts of friends and colleagues to Facebook and LinkedIn. She was also able to take digital copies of banner ad campaigns and Web site graphics she designed.

The company even let Ms. Liro keep her work laptop after they wiped clean all of the files and software. “It only makes sense for companies to work with their employees,” says Ms. Liro, of Holliston, Mass. “You really do want to leave on a positive note.”

At Laughlin Constable, a marketing company in Chicago, laid-off or fired employees have their computer access limited and email restricted as soon as they are notified that they will be let go, says Joyce O’Brien, executive vice president of human resources.

“About 70 percent of our employees ask to have something off of their computer” when they are laid off, Ms. O’Brien says. Requests for personal files are reviewed by the IT department, human resources and the chief financial officer, she says. The company tries to give back personal information to laid-off workers as long as it isn’t a sensitive termination, Ms. O’Brien says. The personal files are retrieved by the company.

Employees are better off assuming that their company will take a conservative approach, says James Bucking, an employment lawyer for Foley Hoag LLP in Boston.

Employees worried about their job security should review the forms they signed when they were hired. They should look at the company’s electronic communications policy, employee guidelines and non-compete agreements to make sure they understand everything properly. When employees sign these agreements, they should also make copies to save at home, too, Ms. Yancey says. Those that break these agreements risk being fired or sued by their employer, she adds.

You should also be aware that the contact information for business associates made during employment and stored on an office computer — or even a Rolodex — usually belongs to the company, Mr. Bucking says.

When Tony Scida was laid off recently from his proofreader position at a small advertising agency in Richmond, Va., he didn’t take any email contacts from his computer because he signed a non-compete agreement. That didn’t much matter. He found most of them on Facebook and LinkedIn, and can contact them there.

Write to Joseph De Avila at joseph.deavila@wsj.com

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page D1

By KAREN WILKIN

Banco de Mexico Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums/Artists Rights Society

Diego Rivera’s ‘Agrarian Leader Zapata’ (1931)

New York

In December 1931 a Diego Rivera retrospective opened here at the Museum of Modern Art, then just two years old and not yet located in its signature modernist building on 53rd Street. Rivera (1886-1957) was, at 45, a heroic figure, the best known of the “Mexican muralists” involved in the ambitious public-art program developed in the 1920s, following the Mexican Revolution. His fame apparently consoled museum trustees troubled by his leftist politics, but there were other challenges. Rivera’s most important works were immense, site specific and immovable. How to represent this acclaimed artist fully in a New York museum?

The solution: MoMA brought Rivera to New York six weeks early, to execute a specially commissioned group of “portable murals” in an improvised studio space in an unused gallery. He worked round the clock with three assistants to paint five large frescoes on blocks of plaster. (“Portable” is relative; backed with concrete and steel, measuring up to 6 feet by 8 feet, the largest commissioned murals weigh half a ton apiece.) For speed, and perhaps for recognition, Rivera excerpted images from his most celebrated Mexican murals—the Spanish conquest, a sturdy native population, ardent revolutionaries, the nobility of labor—all embodied by his customary tight-packed, swelling forms. After the retrospective opened, he added three frescoes inspired by the many buildings under construction in Depression-era New York: machines, the skyline, more nobility of labor.

One fresco from this remarkable cycle remained in MoMA’s collection: the bold, Renaissance-inflected “Agrarian Leader Zapata,” with the mustachioed, white-clad figure holding an elegant white horse whose rider he has just vanquished. Now, “Diego Rivera: Murals for the Museum of Modern Art” reunites this iconic image with four of the other original “portable” works. They are accompanied by lively, full-scale preparatory drawings—some of them stand-ins for absent frescoes—and related works. There are also watercolors from Rivera’s 1927-28 trip to Moscow, documenting an interminable parade celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Russian Revolution.

The Emiliano Zapata portrait is the most familiar and potent of the frescoes, with its Paolo Uccello-inspired simplifications and luminous whites glowing against tropical greens and browns. The other Mexican-themed murals verge on illustration, but the New York images, while no less engagé, are more inventive. Their reduced palette evokes black-and-white documentary photographs (or the Cubist paintings Rivera studied during his long sojourn in Paris). “Electric Power,” on loan from the collection of Vicky and Marcos Micha Levy, frames skilled workers with steel girders. “Frozen Assets,” from the Museo Dolores Olmedo in Xochimilco, Mexico, presents a literally stratified society: a fantastic panorama of identifiable skyscrapers (constructed with the cheap labor made available by the Depression) above an eerie scene of a homeless-men’s dormitory, above a bank vault. “Frozen Assets” leaves no doubt about Rivera’s political sympathies, but its play of deep and shallow space, flatness and illusion, overrides polemics. It makes us wish that the painter’s notorious mural for Rockefeller Center—the aborted project is documented at MoMA—had survived.

***

Washington

By chance, MoMA’s showing of Rivera’s “portable murals” overlaps with a special installation at the National Gallery of canvases by Joan Miró (1893-1983) that could be described the same way, although there the resemblance ends. Over three days in May 1962, the Catalan Miró, in his Mallorca studio, worked on Mural Painting I, II and III, each about 9 feet by 12 feet. Far from working round the clock, like the leftist Mexican, Miró, the good bourgeois, took the weekend off between I and II. Unlike Rivera’s frescoes, Miró’s vast works are private, not public; abstract, not illusionistic or narrative; and devoid of overt political content—something forbidden, in any event, to an internationally acclaimed artist working in Francisco Franco’s Spain. Instead, they are miracles of economy, each an expanse of a single intense color—yellow-orange, green, red—punctuated with sparse, fragile lines. With their subtly modulated fields and tremulous drawing, they reprise the qualities of Miró’s ravishing, ethereal works of the 1920s.

Until they join the retrospective “Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape,” at the National Gallery on May 6, the three Mural Paintings, on loan from a private collector, are installed on a balcony space in the East Wing where we can view them as a series, from a distance, and then come close to savor surface nuances and eloquent drawing ref. From afar, the generously scaled floating lines—vertical and parallel, richly curved, delicately touching and retreating—almost disappear. As we approach, their refinement and adroitness become visible, evidence of a virtuosity honed over more than four decades of experimenting with materials and methods. As a total configuration, the sequence of exquisite lines propels us across the three fields, until we are arrested by two levitating black dots on the upper left of the orange panel; slightly unequal in size, apparently weightless, a unique incident in the ensemble, the dots stare back, like eyes, shifting the weight of the whole.

Then we start remembering that even the most “abstract” of Miró’s inventions are part of a complex, personal shorthand for maleness and femaleness, birds, animals and other elements of his environment. The drawn configurations start suggesting personages, flight, openness and more, while the very colors of the canvases take on allusive overtones. The red and golden orange become the emblematic colors of the Catalan flag and coat of arms, once banned, now ubiquitous in the post-Franco era “nation.” Is the lush green an equivalent of landscape? Perhaps the two cycles of “portable murals” are less different than we thought.

Ms. Wilkin writes about art for the Journal.

By EMILY MALTBY

For business owner Chet Biernat, recovery is coming in fits and starts.

His transportation brokerage company, INCON Container USA Ltd., saw sales slip up to 30% in the recession. As customers now trickle back, the Royal Palm Beach, Fla., company is seeing “spurts of positive areas, but then it drops off without rhyme or reason,” Mr. Biernat says. Because of the unpredictable economy, he’s wary of re-hiring four employees laid off last year.

Mr. Biernat’s story is typical of many entrepreneurs, who as a group turned slightly more pessimistic in February, according to the latest data from the National Federation of Independent Business. Small-business owners reporting to the trade group’s monthly economic index started predicting in April 2009 that sales would pick up. But actual sales fell, hitting record lows through 2009 and posting only modest upticks in 2010.

Yet, there are signs that some industries are faring better than others and may see improvements in earnings this year. Manufacturing, trucking and machine-related industries, which experienced sales declines of 20% to 30% in 2009, could make the greatest strides toward economic recovery, according to Sageworks Inc., a research firm in Raleigh, N.C., that collects data on private companies.

“There is some growth in big public companies that are exporting to growing economies,” says Drew White, chief financial officer at Sageworks. “Those big companies are paying vendors who are small businesses. That’s where revenue increases will come and people will start hiring.”

Some large manufacturers are ramping up, including Boeing Co., which is increasing aircraft output to meet rising demand. The company said earlier this month that its suppliers are ready for the faster production schedules.

Also, notes NFIB’s chief economist Bill Dunkelberg, stimulus money to the private sector has gone to big construction for government contracts—many of which have yet to break ground —and hasn’t flowed heavily through the supply chain to the smaller manufacturing firms. “This recovery is led by manufacturing and business purchases of equipment,” he says.

Companies that depend on consumer spending, such as grocery, clothing and electronic and appliance stores, posted sales drops of less than 2% last year, while sporting goods, gift, and liquor stores stayed even with or slightly better than 2008. These industries have shown signs life in the early months of this year, too, according to Yellowbook, which tracks contact information-lookup searches by company type. From November 2009 to January 2010, beauty salons, gift shops and sporting goods stores saw some of the biggest surges in search count.

But despite faring better than manufacturing firms this past year, experts say that lifestyle industries most likely won’t be the leaders in economic recovery. This, they say, is because consumer confidence—which drives these types of businesses—has been much slower to bounce back compared to big business contracts, which propel manufacturing firms. “Consumer spending is pretty puny,” Mr. Dunkelberg says. “This time, the consumer is not leading the way out.”

In Napa Valley, entrepreneur Doug Shafer’s winery, Shafer Vineyards Inc., depends on profits from restaurants that stock their cellars with Shafer bottles. Last year, sales fell 10% as fewer guests patronized restaurants and those who did bought food and beverages in the lower price range.

This year, Mr. Shafer and his father, who founded the business, have noticed a slight sales increase in the early months of 2010, but they are being cautious. “Betting on 2010 is playing poker,” he explains. “I don’t think it is doing as well as I had anticipated, but I’m tickled pink that it is doing as well as it is. While things aren’t rosy, I’m not seeing doom and gloom.”

Write to Emily Maltby at emily.maltby@wsj.com

By MELISSA KORN

Late December brings thoughts of Santa and snowmen. And for many M.B.A. hopefuls, significant stress

Tuck School of Business

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Harvard Business School, University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and other top business schools in coming days will inform applicants of their first-round admissions decisions. A lucky few (roughly 14%-20% for Wharton and 12% for HBS, based on last year’s numbers) will receive letters of acceptance, but others who are waitlisted or rejected must scramble to meet later deadlines at other schools or gear up to try again next year.

Dawna Clarke, director of admissions at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business in Hanover, N.H., spoke with The Wall Street Journal about her school’s admissions process and what waitlisted or rejected applicants can do to better their chances next time around, just minutes before the school sent out its admission decisions last Friday.

(Ms. Clarke declined to say just how many were accepted in this round, but said the school ultimately admits 450 to 500 students – 17% to 20% of the applicant pool – with about 270 enrolling.)

Edited excerpts:

WSJ: How was this round’s application volume compared with prior years?

Ms. Clarke: Our applications were down about 7% [this year], but we had a big year last year – up about 7.5%. Last year, we marketed in a more personalized, efficient way, and we did a lot more summer visitation days.

WSJ: How does your waitlist system work?

Ms. Clarke: We usually put a couple hundred [applicants] on the waitlist, but not everyone will opt in. The number that we admit varies considerably, from four one year to 60 one year, depending on how generous we [are] with offers, what our yield [is].

We put somebody on the waitlist if there’s something they can do to improve their chances in the next couple of months. We may advise them to come for an interview, or take a couple of quantitative classes, or re-take the GMAT.

WSJ: Do you tell rejected applicants why they were rejected?

Ms. Clarke: We don’t have the time to do that in the midst of the admissions season, but we have several months in the spring in which we provide feedback to applicants who were denied. Generally, 150 people a year [ask for feedback].

It’s important for us to be honest with people as to whether we think they have a viable chance of being admitted in the future or there are just so many weaknesses in the application that it would behoove them to look at alternative [schools].

WSJ: Who should write an applicant’s recommendation?

Ms. Clarke: The best recommendations come from people who directly supervise and really know the applicant, give anecdotes and bring some color to the applicant’s file.

I read a recommendation once from somebody at an investment bank, talking about the extent to which this applicant was an incredible team player. This woman stayed up all night with a team that wasn’t even her own because she had a skill-set that nobody in the other team had. Anecdotes like that are very memorable.

WSJ: When assessing an application, do you care how long candidates stay at an individual job? Is it OK if they bounce around?

Ms. Clarke: It depends on why they’re jumping around. Sometimes people have very good reasons – the other organization offered them an opportunity to manage people or projects, or there was some level of progression that was afforded in the next opportunity. It’s very important for people to explain their transitions.

WSJ: What’s the most memorable essay you’ve ever received – good or bad?

Ms. Clarke: There was a great essay I read recently about a person who was proud of the progression in his management skills because of the extent to which he took a problem employee and made that [individual] into a rising star.

Sometimes people talk about personal challenges that they’ve gone through that show resiliency and persistence. You have to balance [when] writing an essay that’s appropriate for a business school. Sometimes personal challenges really help illuminate the nature of the person, and sometimes people can share too much.

Write to Melissa Korn at melissa.korn@wsj.com