Ground Breaking in New Deal Washington, DC

Abstract

Although collaborative enterprise and collective values are recurrent themes in studies of New Deal art, during 1936–45, an African American official in Washington, DC, spurred creation of a series of artworks that addressed difference, rather than consensus, by taking up the thorny issue of race. Recorder of Deeds William J. Thompkins oversaw production of the largest body of federal art inspired by ideals of the early civil rights movement. That movement, however, was not monolithic, and Thompkins’s previously unstudied patronage produced a highly personal art of racial activism, one that simultaneously celebrated African American achievement and endorsed interracial collaboration.