Federal Art Project Research Articles

The Federal Art Project and the Creation of Middlebrow Culture

Review of: The Federal Art Project and the Creation of Middlebrow Culture by Victoria Grieve.

Modernity, Mestizaje, and Hispano Art: Patrocinio Barela and the Federal Art Project

Modernity, Mestizaje, and Hispano Art: Patrocinio Barela and the Federal Art Project Stephanie Lewthwaite New Mexico’s reputation as a cultural center dedicated to the preservation and revival of Native American and Hispano arts since the early 1900s is well documented. While the anthropological and archaeological “discovery” of the Southwest, the art colonies of Taos and Santa Fe, and the revival of Spanish colonial arts under Anglo patrons are well known, the Hispano artists who straddled multiple art worlds during the early twentieth century are less so.1 The “recovery” of Hispano artists—initiated by William Wroth and Charles Briggs and continued more recently by Laurie Kalb and Tey Marianna Nunn—remains far from complete.2 Although we know more about the Hispano artists who achieved regional and national acclaim during this period, most often through the New Deal’s WPA-funded Federal Art Project (FAP), Eurocentric aesthetic and anthropological categories of place, tradition, and authenticity have occluded the significance of their work. As Tey Marianna Nunn claims, Hispanos were invariably perceived as ethnic craftspeople rather than as artists in their own right.3 The positioning of Hispano art through terms such as craft, folk, and primitive precludes a thorough analysis of the connections among art, ethnicity, and modernity, and an understanding of Hispano artists as “modern” cultural agents. I examine the life and work of Hispano artist Patrocinio Barela. A santero sculptor (a carver of saints and devotional images) sponsored by the FAP in 1935, Barela was one of the few Hispanos to achieve national acclaim as an artist rather than as a craftsperson. Barela lay at the intersection of several complementary discourses about art and Americanism during the New Deal. Barela was an everyman, a universal laborer-cum-artist who was both a “modern primitive”4 and a product of cultural mixing between Europe and indigenous America. Barela Stephanie Lewthwaite is a lecturer in the School of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham, United Kingdom. Journal of the Southwest 52, 1 (Spring 2010) : 41–70 42 ✜ Journal of the Southwest symbolized the New Deal’s drive to democratize art by promoting a more pluralistic Americanism and by improving inter-American relations. However, New Deal rhetoric elevated Barela while sidelining him from modernity as a primitive, untrained, and instinctive artist. Barela has rarely been considered as a modernist in the conventional sense.5 Yet, a re-examination of Barela’s aesthetic forms and the multiple artistic, social, and ethnic worlds in which he circulated as a “transcultural agent” suggest the emergence of an “alternative hybrid modernism.”6 Barela must be repositioned within an evolving modernist multicultural art canon, for the wider processes of modernization and intercultural exchange that impacted Hispano communities during this period deeply informed Barela’s work and the evolution of a new santero aesthetic. Hispano Art, Anglo Patronage, and the New Deal New Mexico’s reputation as a cultural center dedicated to the preservation and revival of Native American and Hispano art after the early 1900s framed the New Dealer’s response to Barela’s work. The state became “America’s Orient” and an alternative cultural frontier where archaeologists, anthropologists, and avant-garde artists “discovered” new models of cultural exchange and coexistence. The state’s rural, folk, and indigenous communities in particular served as bulwarks against the modern machine age and as sites for spiritual and cultural rebirth.7 In the midst of America’s “crisis of modernity,” fears about cultural loss and regional distinctiveness spawned efforts to preserve local ethnic cultures, and Native American and Hispano arts in particular.8 Yet, the Hispano revival derived less momentum regionally and nationally than the Native American revival, because Hispano arts were invariably viewed as utilitarian objects rather than as art. Anthropologists and archaeologists demonstrated greater interest in the indigenous Pueblo culture.9 However, parallels between the treatment of Native American and Hispano arts exist, for Hispano art was also subject to the preservationist impulses of Anglo artists and reformers during the 1920s and 1930s. This revival was driven by vocational manual arts training programs in rural Hispano schools and by the Spanish Colonial Arts Society, established in Santa Fe in 1925 under Mary Austin...

The Federal Art Project and the creation of middlebrow culture

The Federal Art Project and the creation of middlebrow culture

Black Presidents, Gay Marriages, and Hawaiian Sovereignty: Reimagining Citizenship in the Age of Obama

This article examines the history of the Design Laboratory, which was founded in 1935 by the Federal Art Project as the first comprehensive school of modernist design in the United States. The Laboratory embodied the vital connections that existed between modernist design and radical political and social activism in the United States during the 1930s, providing a vibrant point of contact between the business culture of America’s industrial design entrepreneurs, the artistic experimentation of the Depression-Era avant-garde, an unprecedented public art bureaucracy, and militant labor unionism and consumer activism. Following cuts in government funding in 1937, the school continued operation as a cooperative sponsored by a radical white-collar union before financial difficulties forced it to close in 1940.

When Modernism Was Still Radical: The Design Laboratory and the Cultural Politics of Depression-Era America

This article examines the history of the Design Laboratory, which was founded in 1935 by the Federal Art Project as the first comprehensive school of modernist design in the United States. The Laboratory embodied the vital connections that existed between modernist design and radical political and social activism in the United States during the 1930s, providing a vibrant point of contact between the business culture of America’s industrial design entrepreneurs, the artistic experimentation of the Depression-Era avant-garde, an unprecedented public art bureaucracy, and militant labor unionism and consumer activism. Following cuts in government funding in 1937, the school continued operation as a cooperative sponsored by a radical white-collar union before financial difficulties forced it to close in 1940.

The Federal Art Project and the Creation of Middlebrow Taste (review)

The Federal Art Project and the Creation of Middlebrow Taste (review)

Labor's canvas: American working-class history and the WPA art of the 1930s

At an unprecedented and probably unique American moment, laboring people were indivisible from the art of the 1930s. By far the most recognizable New Deal art employed an endless frieze of white or racially ambiguous machine proletarians, from solo drillers to identical assembly line toilers. Even today such paintings, particularly those with work themes, are almost instantly recognizable. Happening on a Depression-era picture, one can see from a distance the often simplified figures, the intense or bold colors, the frozen motion or flattened perspective, and the uniformity of laboring bodies within an often naive realism or naturalism of treatment. In a kind of Social Realist dance, the FAP's imagined drillers, haulers, construction workers, welders, miners, and steel mill workers make up a rugged industrial army. In an unusual synthesis of art and working-class history, Labor's Canvas argues that however simplified this golden age of American worker art appears from a post-modern perspective, The New Deal's Federal Art Project (FAP), under the aegis of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), revealed important tensions. Artists saw themselves as cultural workers who had much in common with the blue-collar workforce. Yet they struggled to reconcile social protest and aesthetic distance. Their canvases, prints, and drawings registered attitudes toward laborers as bodies without minds often shared by the wider culture. In choosing a visual language to reconnect workers to the larger society, they tried to tell the worker from the work with varying success. Drawing on a wealth of social documents and visual narratives, Labor's Canvas engages in a bold revisionism. Hapke examines how FAP iconography both chronicles and reframes working-class history. She demonstrates how the New Deal's artistically rendered workforce history reveals the cultural contradictions about laboring people evident even in the depths of the Great Depression, not the least in the imaginations of the FAP artists themselves.

The Records of the New York Composers' Forum: The Documentary Motive and Music in the 1930s

The New York City Composers' Forum-Laboratory was created in 1935 as part of the Music Education Division of the Federal Music Project (FMP), under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), funded by Roosevelt's Depression-era New Deal. The Forum was a unique phenomenon in the history of American music. For the first time in American history, the federal government played an active and enthusiastic role in sponsoring and funding the arts. The federally funded Music Project--along with the Federal Writers Project, Federal Theater Project, and Federal Arts Project--was initiated as part of the larger Works Progress Administration (later renamed the Works Projects Administration) in order to get artists and musicians off the streets, out of the breadlines, and into jobs. Yet many people in the musical commu-nitv fervently hoped and believed that it would develop into a permanently funded arts program. A popular venue for the performances of new music, the Composers' Forum thrived from 1935 to 1940. Weekly--and later, biweekly--concerts introduced an exceptional variety of composers to a newly developing audience. Each Forum featured one or two composers, among them Amy Marcy Beach, Aaron Copland, Henry Cowell, Ruth Crawford, Roger Sessions, and Elie Siegmeister. Admission was free. Question-and-answer sessions between composers and audience followed the conceits, prompting discussions on a range of topics: modernism, politics, gender, representations of race, Jewish music, American identity, jazz, and other art forms. A stenographer took careful and thorough transcripts of the discussions, and these survive in the National Archives II, in College Park. Maryland. The success of the New York City Composers' Forum prompted cities across the country to institute similar programs. Boston and Philadelphia established flourishing forums that met weekly. Forums in Los Angeles and Chicago were only slightly less active, while cities like Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, and San Francisco held forums from time to time. Other activities by the New York branch included a collaboration with Lincoln Kirstein's Ballet Caravan to present an evening of All-American ballets--Virgil Thomson's Filling Station, Robert McBride's Showpiece, and Paul Bowles's Yankee Clipper. A special summer season of concerts, produced in conjunction with the 1939-40 New York World's Fair, was broadcast over WNYC, and a series of the regular concerts was broadcast over WQXR. Under the auspices of the Forum, Roy Harris presented a lecture series entitled Let's Make Music over WNYC, which attracted thousands of active listeners. After 1939, federal support for the Forums ceased and various organizations assumed responsibility for maintaining the Forum, which exists to this day (1) THE DOCUMENTARY IMPULSE The careful documenting of Composers' Forum post-concert discussions makes this series particularly valuable for musicological research today. At no other time in American musical history were the reactions and thoughts of the audience documented so extensively and systematically. This emphasis on documentation reflected a wider American phenomenon of the thirties. As William Stott observes, a documentary motive was at work throughout the culture of the time: in the rhetoric of the New Deal and the WPA arts projects; in painting, dance, fiction, and theater; in the new media of radio and picture magazines; in popular thought, education, and advertising. (2) The goal of this documentary work was to record the American experience. The America of the 1930s was engaged in a cultural revolution. Not only did America own a cultural identity, it was a culture that needed to be shared with a broad new public. The documentary motive broughtcomposers and listeners face-to-face for the first time, and recorded the result. Audience reactions, thoughts, and attitudes, usually so elusive, are represented in the Forum documents in abundance, providing a compelling testament to the power of reception and to the dynamic relationship between composer and listener. …

See America: WPA Posters and the Mapping of a New Deal Democracy

In September 1931, the American Automobile Association (AAA) announced a substantial boom in travel to the Western United States, with some of their travel bureaus reporting a fifty percent increase in the number of inquiries received over the previous year (Organized Motordom IO).1 The notice, which was printed in the organization's monthly magazine, credited the federal government with stimulating much of this tourism. It explained that federally subsidized highway and road construction, combined with improved motoring services and the low cost of vacationing in the national parks, encouraged motor travel.2 This tide of tourism, as the notice described it, continued under the Roosevelt administration, which sponsored a variety of roadbuilding programs and highway improvements in an attempt to spark the depression era economy. In addition to funding emergency road repairs, the administration subsidized the construction of new bridges and roads, as well as highways like Skyline Drive, the Blue Ridge Parkway, and the Key West Overseas Highway. In addition to these projects, the government launched a series of promotions to encourage travel within the United States, including a see campaign. As a part of this initiative, the United States Travel Bureau commissioned the Federal Art Project (FAP) to create a number of posters promoting domestic travel. The series, which includes a large pictorial map of the United States and several smaller posters of specific tourist sites, equated tourism with a knowledge of the nation that extends beyond the topography of the land. Illustrating historical sites, popular cultural attractions, and natural landmarks, the series links national identity with a shared history as well as geography. In promoting destinations that represented the nation's past and present, the collection exemplifies the depression era search for a usable past that could ameliorate social tensions and unite Americans by recovering and affirming national values. Moreover, it equated the Native and African American to this seemingly authentic past while downplaying their respective roles in the modern nation-state and promoting a vision of America predicated on whiteness. While scholars have written extensively on other FAP projects, including prints produced by the FAP's graphic arts division, few have focused on the project's posters. Furthermore, what has been published offers little contextualization for the works beyond the circumstances surrounding their production.3 The FAP's poster division, which had units in over eighteen states by 1938, produced over two million posters in eight years and made a significant contribution to the depression era visual culture (DeNoon 13, 22; O'Conner 305). Moreover, these posters were displayed in schools, community centers, subways, and other public fora; they served as an important medium of communication for the Roosevelt administration. This article represents one part of a larger study addressing the significance of these posters within the broader cultural context of the depression era. Drawing from the growing body of literature on tourism and race, I address links between the FAP's see posters, the tourist industry, and racial performance. In addition, I argue that the series participated in a larger cultural dialogue surrounding the construction of national identity during the depression era. Tourism and the see Poster Series The surviving see posters were created by the New York City poster division of the FAP. The FAP was established in 1935 as a part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a re lief program designed to create jobs during the depression. The New York division, which was in operation between 1935 and 1943, was the first poster unit established by the Roosevelt administration (DeNoon 17). At the height of its production, the New York division employed approximately 35 designers, 20 printers, and 10-12 cutters (DeNoon 19). …

The New Deal and People's Art: Market Planners and Radical Artists

The New Deal and People's Art Market Planners andRadical Artists byDavid A. Horowitz RESPONDING AFTER THE 1932 election to 25 percent unemployment, falling demand forgoods, demoralizing deflation, and massive evaporation of investment, Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal committed the federal gov ernment tounprecedented intervention ina peacetime economywith an agenda of relief,recovery,and reform.Banks, public utilities, stock exchanges,mines, agriculture, and working conditions all now came under regulation from Washington. Agencies like theTennes seeValley Authority (TVA), theCivil ian Conservation Corps (CCC), and theWorks Progress Administration (WPA) expanded or rebuilt elements of the nation's infrastructure such as Oregon's Pacific Coast Highway and Mt. Hood's Timberline Lodge. New Deal policies backed industrial labor unions, enacted minimum wage laws, established the social security system, and provided work and cash relief to An earlier version of this essay was presented before the Labor Arts Forum on theArt of the Roosevelt Era at the Portland Art Museum, October 9,2004. 318 OHQ vol. 109, no. 2 needy families.Millions of otherswere assisted through low-interest loans and refinanced farmand home mortgages. Almost all of these activities, from social welfare subsidies to public works, were designed to revitalize or protect theeconomy by stimulating mass purchasing power. By the late-i930s, a coalition of retail,banking, and labor interests,led by Federal Reserve Board ChairMarriner Eccles, had worked with administration economists to enact fiscal and monetary policies embrac ingdeficit spending,huge public invest ment, progressive taxpolicies, and relief programs. By distributing government benefits, credit, and infrastructure grants, they hoped to stimulate pri vate investment, get people back to work, and reinvigorate themarket. As reformers,New Dealers believed that theeconomy could be salvaged through intelligent planning and constructive social action. One resultwas the social securitysystemofunemployment insur ance, old-age pensions, assistance to singlemothers, and help for thephysi callydisabled. The final example of their work was theGI Bill of 1944,the massive public investment in education, aid, training,and home financing for World War IIveterans thatfacilitatedtheriseof thepost-World War IImiddle class. The New Deal sought to accomplish these goals through a discourse empha sizing thegovernment's role inunifying thepeople around common citizenship and service to the nation. Although mainly directed toward European eth nics, particularlyRoman Catholics and Jews,in contrast toAfrican American, Hispanic, orAsian minorities, Roosevelt rhetoric identifiedcitizenshipwith "the people," whose strength and common purpose were to liftthe nation out of theDepression. Public artwas to be compatible with this newly emerging national culture.New Deal officials saw artas a public commodity.They believed thatthegovernment could take the lead in popularizing the production and consumption of art among ordinary Americans so thatthearts would no lon gerbe theprivileged preserve of therich. Articulating a philosophy of aesthetic populism, federaladministrators hoped tobring representationalartto the masses through works thataddressed theUvesof ordinarypeople and theexperiencesof an authenticallyAmerican culture. Artistic realism contrasted with the revolution inabstract canvases thathad begun inthe1910s with Cubists likePablo Picasso ? who painted images from multiple perspectives, a phenomenon viewed as anunwelcome symbolof social and cultural fragmentationbyRoosevelt arts officials. New Dealers preferred genres like themural ? which could deliver images topeople inpublic arenas likehousing projects, schools, hospitals, correctional institutions,or post offices. Roosevelt era projects often relied on printreproductions to make artaccessible to millions ofAmericans. The federalgov ernmenteven createdan IndexofAmeri canDesign?a collection of twenty-two thousand graphic recreations (usually watercolors or drawings) of handicraft artifactsdating as farback as the eigh teenth century. These exhibits were displayed in popular gathering places such as department stores.More than half of thefivehundred participants in Reflections on theNew Deal inOregon 319 ^^^^^^^H^r^^S??ku^H^^IC .Tiki ^ ??^^^HH^^^^^^H Martina Gangle's The Homesteaders, orceo/fwomural panels of 'TheColumbia River Pioneer Migration, was installed in 1940at Portland's Rose City Grade School under theauspices of the federallyfunded Oregon Art Project. thefederalgovernment'sPaintingProject were involved indocumentary photog raphyor applied arts likestagedesign or archivaldocumentation. Artwas further brought to thepeople through sixhun dred local art centers across thenation, including facilitiesinSalem, La Grande, and theOregon Coast. Inaugurated under the WPA in 1935, the Federal Arts Project (FAP) shared theconsumerist and populist aesthetic goals of theRoosevelt administration. There were some practical reasons for this approach. First, the administra tion believed that economic recovery depended upon restoration...

T. B. Harlem

lice Neel, one of the most important 20th century American portrait painters, was born on January 28, 1900, in Merion Square, PA. She was raised in Colwyn, a suburb of Philadelphia, and attended the Philadelphia School of Design for Women (now Moore College of Art) from 1921 to 1925. During most of the 1930s, Neel lived in Greenwich Village. Although much of her work during this decade represented her very liberal sociopolitical views, she also, like many other artists, joined the WPA (Works Progress Administration) Federal Art Project, for which she produced idyllic portraits of employed industrial workers and of New York City. From 1938 to the early 1960s, Neel lived in Spanish Harlem, where she portrayed the community’s culture through her depictions of its peoples and dwellings. T. B. Harlem was painted during this period and illustrates the ravages of a poverty-induced illness. The young Puerto Rican patient, Carlos Negron, has had a thoracoplasty, a common treatment for tuberculosis in the preantibiotic era. “In the painting, he had just returned from the hospital, but would soon go back. What a crucifixion he went through,” Neel commented [1]. Although throughout her career Neel painted other subjects such as still lifes, urban landscapes, and street scenes, portraits dominated her output, particularly after 1940. Alice Neel, who, like so many other women artists, worked so long in relative obscurity, became increasingly recognized as a preeminent portrait painter during the last 15 years of her life. She had only a few solo exhibitions before the age of 65, but since then has had more than 100, including several major retrospectives. Although portraiture has been historically associated with the rich and powerful, Neel’s gallery is a personal journal of the people who entered her life, including the left-wing artists and activists in Greenwich Village in the 1930s, the residents of Spanish Harlem during World War II and the McCarthy era, the New York art world during the socially turbulent late 1960s and 1970s, and especially her family. Neel’s portraits are quickly recognized. The subjects look directly at and engage the viewer and dominate the paintings. Her nonfamily figures are usually pulled forward and given little environment except for the chair they are sitting on. In many of the numerous portraits of her two sons and their families and a few of the artists who were important to her, Neel deepens the space and increases the complexity of the background of the painting. Her paintings have an uncanny ability to capture the personalities of her sitters. Neel received an honorary doctorate from the Moore College of Art in 1971, was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1976, and received a 1979 National Women’s Caucus for Art award for outstanding achievement in art, the latter presented to her by President Jimmy Carter. Her paintings are in most major American museums, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art; the National Gallery of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Whitney Museum of American Art; The Art Institute of Chicago; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco. Alice Neel died on October 13, 1984.

For the Millions: American Art and Culture between the Wars

Changing concepts of modernity and democratic access transformed Americans' beliefs about the social roles of visual art during the interwar decades. A. Joan Saab's intriguing book demonstrates that diligent primary source research and innovative reassessment of institutional activities can contribute important new concepts to this topic, already widely discussed in American art-historical scholarship. Two theses focus Saab's study. She argues, first, that the Federal Art Project (1935–1943), the New York Museum of Modern Art (founded in 1929), the organizers of the 1939–1940 New York World's Fair, and Life magazine in the late 1940s each instituted a distinctive pedagogical strategy to present visual art to a broad public audience as a modern form of cultural expression linked to democratic ideals. Second, she also interrogates the ways in which these competing projects contributed first to what she calls the desacralization of contemporary art during the 1930s and then to its resacralization in the postwar era. Her research has unearthed fascinating new material from archival and published sources, and she enlivens her argument with individual voices by drawing on a wide range of contemporary critical reviews, speeches, radio texts, and essays.

Affirming Whiteness: Visualizing California Agriculture

Affirming Whiteness:Visualizing California Agriculture Marilyn Wyman (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. The Guardian of the Waters, San Diego, California [End Page 32] The Guardian of the Waters (Figure 1) looks down over the citizens of San Diego.1 As a fountain, she signifies the importance of water in the development of culture and community in the otherwise hot, dry climate of California's southernmost metropolitan center. Sculptor Donal Hord, raised in this dry southern California climate, understood the vagaries of what geobotanists call the "Sonora Zone." In an essay written for the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration, Hord acknowledged the dynamics of water —its availability, its conservation— as the essential issue of the region.2 For Hord, the vagaries of nature rather than personalities determined the development of his Southern California community. But Donal Hord's Guardian, completed for the Works Projects Administration Federal Art Project in 1939, is more than a symbol of the forces of nature in the Southland. She also signifies the growing nativism of the Depression years and the need to reaffirm traditional American values within a population displaced by unemployment and failed farms. Although Guardian of the Waters appears to us today as a rather cumbersome, if not benign, figure, unenthusiastically viewed by those who espouse the power of modernism over regionalism, her appearance in 1939 sparked a controversy that cut to the core of the American-ness of the Federal Projects themselves. Guardian of the Waters is a twelve-foot tall silver-grey granite figure standing on an eight-foot drum embellished by a stylized landscape and anthropomorphized clouds. She looks out over the [End Page 33] federal plaza with downcast eyes while lifting to her left shoulder a Yuma (Indian)—style water jug from which life-giving water symbolically flows over the arid southern California land. Her skirt, emphasizing her compact nature, is composed of stylized pleats and folds inspired by the thick, fluted, columnar stem of the native Saguaro cactus. A shawl wraps around her upper torso and covers her head. Who is this guardian lifting the jug of water in silent prayer? To some, she was the archetypal American pioneer woman—strong, valiant, self-reliant, and capable of dominating an inhospitable environment. For others, her broad facial features, shawl and jug all pointed to one ethnicity — Mexican. And, in the race-conscious environment of the 1930s, they were outraged. Hord and his supporters from the San Diego Fine Arts Society successfully defended the commission, and Guardian of the Waters was completed as proposed. The heated controversy surrounding her features, the disdain for an image that looked Mexican and was therefore "deviant," (un-American) would be played out in the 1930s on many stages throughout California. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Mural in U.S. Post Office, Modesto, California By contrast, in the California Central Valley city of Modesto (Figure 2), white farmers look down from the walls over citizens as they enter the main post office. Grain in the field waves in an unseen breeze; tractors plow across the fertile fields; conveyor belts hum as they move the crop to waiting market trucks; women stand with baskets laden with the succulent fruits of the harvest. No Dust Bowl here; no trace of migrant laborers; no sense of the poverty and displaced field workers who made these crops possible— who made this farm successful. [End Page 34] This benign farmer and his wife give little evidence of the underlying alienation of the Depression years in California — the potent nativism; the fear of legal and illegal aliens in the fields; the need to reaffirm American-ness in a state with a large Mexican and Mexican-American population and a burgeoning population of migrants displaced by the Dustbowl of the American Midwest. Nor does this mural speak to the decimated farms in the heartland of the United States. The stock market collapse in October 1929 was not the first signal that the American economy was in trouble, but few people paid much attention to the American heartland. Landowners in the Midwestern or Plains states had financially over-extended themselves during World...

Statement of Miné Okubo before the Congressional Committee on Wartime Relocation and Internment (1981)

This is a new experience for me. My name is Mine Okubo. I am an artist. I was traveling and studying in Europe for almost two years on a fellowship from the University of California. I made the last American ship leaving Bordeaux, France. When I returned to California, I worked on the Federal Arts Project. At the time of Pearl Harbor and the declaration of World War II, I had been commissioned to do several mosaic murals for the new Oakland Serviceman's Center and for Fort Ord by the Federal Arts Project for the Army.

Dox Thrash: an African American master printmaker rediscovered

Lenders to the ExhibitionForewordPrefaceNote to the Reader Dox Thrash: I Always Wanted to Be an ArtistThe Fine Print Workshop of the Philadelphia Federal Art Project Dox Thrash and the Pyramid ClubRacial Idiom in the Work of Dox ThrashGuide to the Catalogue Raisonne of PrintsAbbreviationsCatalogue Raisonne of PrintsChronologyLifetime Exhibition RecordNotesGlossary of Printmaking TermsSelected BibliographyAlphabetical List of Print TitlesIndexes

New Deal modernism: American literature and the invention of the welfare state

In New Deal Modernism Michael Szalay examines the effect that the rise of the welfare state had on American modernism during the 1930s and 1940s and, conversely, what difference modernism made to the New Deal's famed invention of Big Government. Moving beyond accounts of literary modernism that have been preoccupied with fascism and communism, Szalay situates his study within a liberal culture bent on social security, a culture galvanised by its imagined need for private and public insurance. Because the WPA Federal Arts Project offered a particular kind of insurance - a wage to writers unable to find a market for their work - a salaried class of writers took form, one committed more to producing art than to selling it. This performance-oriented investment in art as process, Szalay claims, was embraced by a diverse group of writers not all of whom were clients of the state. It is through this lens that Szalay looks at writers and others - from Jack London, James M. Cain, Gertrude Stein, and Betty Smith to Busby Berkeley, John Dewey, and John Maynard Keynes. Contributing to the great range of the study are a discussion of the role played by Franklin Roosevelt in this rewriting of free-market culture and extended analyses of the work of Ernest Hemingway, Wallace Stevens, John Steinbeck, and Richard Wright. This examination of the evolution of modernism in its interaction with a reformist federal government will be of compelling interest to students of culture and intellectual history.

Federal art and national culture: the politics of identity in New Deal America

1. The Depression and the New Deal: artistic production in the early 1930s 2. The administrative organisation of the Federal Art Project: power, possession and State 'cultural populism' 3. Nationalising art: The Community Art Center Program 4. 'Technologies of the Soul': Federal art in institutions 5. Indexing American design: the construction of national historicity 6. State cultural strategies: 'community', 'planning' and the New York World's Fair of 1939-40 7. The end of the Federal Art Project: art, politics and the State.

Homecoming: The Art and Life of William H. Johnson (review)

Reviews367 Homecoming: The Art and Life of William H. Johnson. Richard J. Powell. National Museum of American Art, 1991. 255 pp. Cloth, $45.00. Reviewed by Jessie Poesch, professor emerita of art history at Tulane University. She is the author ofThe Art of the Old South: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, and the Products of Craftsmen, 1560-1860, and Newcomb Pottery: An Enterprise for Southern Women, 1895-1940. The last twenty years or so have seen a growing number of substantial studies devoted to African American art, necessary since so much of this work has been virtually ignored in earlier surveys of American art. Richard Powell's study of the life and work of William H. Johnson is one of these. It is well written, thoroughly documented, and beautifully illustrated . His interpretations of individual paintings are particularly fine. Johnson (1904-70) grew up in Florence, South Carolina, within the segregated but secure black community of the time. In 1918 he migrated to New York. In 1921, aspiring to become a newspaper cartoonist, he was admitted to the conservative National Academy of Design. But instead of pursuing a career in journalism, he developed great skill as an academic painter; a beautiful still life, a self-portrait, and some landscapes survive. Upon graduation , his mentor, Charles W. Hawthorne, raised money for Johnson to study for a year in Paris, a mecca for artists. Hawthorne also felt Johnson would suffer discrimination in the U.S., although the young painter apparently enjoyed some camaraderie with fellow artists of various ethnic backgrounds at the academy. The stay abroad lasted from 1926 to the fall of 1929. During a 1929-30 visit to the U.S. Johnson was awarded the Harmon Foundation Gold Medal for Excellence in Fine Arts. His work in a short-lived exhibit of American Negro Art was praised for "blazing a new trail in Negro art" and simultaneously criticized by others for too much influence of French modernism. He then visited his hometown for the first time in twelve years, was honored with a one-day exhibit at the local YMCA, and did a few paintings of relatives and familiar landscapes. (Powell refutes the myth that Johnson was arrested while painting out-of-doors.) He also met Alain Locke in Washington , D.C., staying several days with the distinguished advocate of the New Negro arts movement. He returned to Europe, where he married the Danish textile artist and weaver, Holcha Krake, whom he had met the year before. Johnson's second stay in Europe lasted eight years, from 1930 to 1938. The villages where he and his wife lived in Denmark and Norway accepted the couple's mixed-marriage . Johnson's style underwent subtle changes, with boldly defined forms becoming ever more colorful. Most paintings were of landscapes; his figure subjects were of ordinary working people. In 1938, after Johnson's artist brother-in-law lost his job in Hitler's Germany for work deemed "degenerate," and with the shadow of the Nazis looming large, the couple moved to New York. For a time in 1939 Johnson secured a job with the WPA's local Federal Art Project, an agency that in general advocated American scene painting. He was assigned to teach at the Harlem Community Center. After his 1929-30 visit Johnson had maintained some contact with the Harmon Foundation and Locke, but now he was immersed in the articulate, self-consciously aware Negro culture that had evolved in Harlem's black community during the late 1920s and the 1930s. At the same time he and Holcha were part of the international community of artists based in Greenwich Village, includingJohn Gra- 368Southern Cultures ham, the Russian-bom artist, collector, dealer in African art, and curiously seminal figure in the history of abstract expressionism. As a result of this confluence of experiences and influences, Johnson further modified his style and subject matter. Using African American figure subjects, he created a simple , seemingly naive style of bold, strong outlines, sometimes with exaggerated gestures and proportions, and with almost flat areas of bright colors. These oil paintings include some gutsy, insouciant depictions, full of vitality, of rather flashy characters such as those in Cafe and Street...

The New Deal fine arts projects: a bibliography, 1933-1992

The fine arts projects of the New Deal period were created from an often conflicting set of goals that included relief for unemployed artists, a desire to educate the public in the fine arts, and the practical need to decorate Federal office buildings and post offices. The single largest experiment in the creation of publicly funded art in American history, the projects included the well known WPA Federal Art Project (WPA/FAP), its predecessor, the Public Works of Art Project, and the Treasury Department's Section of Fine Arts (and its successors) which created murals for post offices throughout the nation. The history of various legislative maneuvers which sought to institutionalize the projects are also included. The legacy of these programs is with us today, not only in the works created at the time, but in the careers and creations of artists such as Jackson Pollock, Rockwell Kent, Stuart Davis, Jacob Kainen, and many others whose careers were supported by the New Deal fine arts projects. This book is an exhaustive bibliography of periodical articles, government reports and documents, exhibition catalogs, and monographs on the projects from their inception in subject indexes are included. A history of the projects is provided in an introductory essay. An exhibition chronology, a who's who, and additional documentation on the projects are provided in the appendixes.

The Federal Art Project in Illinois, 1935-1943.

The Federal Art Project in Illinois, 1935–1943. By George J. Mavigliano and Richard A. Lawson. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990. xxii + 257 pp. $24.95.) Get access Robert L. Reid Robert L. Reid University of Southern Indiana Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 78, Issue 3, December 1991, Pages 1131–1132, https://doi.org/10.2307/2078923 Published: 01 December 1991