Narrator
Search results
May 25, 2020 · When the Roosevelt administration rolled out tens of millions of dollars during the New Deal to fund artists, musicians, writers and actors, its mission was more than just job creation.
- Neda Ulaby
Feb 27, 2009 · During the Great Depression, president Franklin Delano Roosevelt promised a “new deal for the American people,” initiating government programs to foster economic recovery. Roosevelt’s pledge to help “the forgotten man” also embraced America’s artists.
- January 3, 2010
- February 27, 2009
- New Deal Photographers
- Walker Evans
- Dorothea Lange
- Abstract Expressionists
- African American Artists
- Native American Artists
- Sources
The field of photography benefitted hugely from the New Deal. In the mid-1930s, the Farm Security Administration’s Resettlement Administration hired photographers to document the work done by the agency, which launched the careers of many major photojournalists. From 1937 to 1942 this army of photographers created iconic images defining the New Dea...
While Arthur Rothstein covered the Great Plains and documented the horror of Dust Bowl storms, Walker Evans photographed small towns and tenant farmers in West Virginia and Pennsylvania and followed the lives of three families in Hale County, Alabama. Evans’ work for the FSA made him one of the most celebrated American photographers, and his work i...
Dorothea Lange is one of the most influential photographers of the FSA, and one of the best-known women photographers ever. Among Lange’s most compelling photographs are images she took of the Dust Bowl. She also followed migrant workers to California, where Lange captured images of struggling farm families, including the iconic Migrant Mother. Gor...
Many American painters who would later find success as Abstract Expressionists got their first commissions through the FAP. These artists were required to submit a new painting every four to six weeks, to be allocated for display in a public building. Jackson Pollack spent eight years working for the WPA, along with his wife and fellow Abstract Exp...
By the middle of the 1930s, WPA projects featured 250,000 African American workers, including those in the Federal Art Project, including many artists crucial to the Harlem Renaissance, like Aaron Douglas. His four-panel mural Aspects of Negro Lifewas featured at the New York Public Library in Harlem. Sculptor Augusta Savage worked to enroll black ...
The Indian Arts and Crafts Board was created in 1935 as part of the Commission on Indian Affairs. Initially, an effort to catalog and promote traditional Native American crafts, it soon advocated for Native American artists to be hired on mural projects for the Department of the Interior. Well-known Navajo painter Gerald Nailor was part of this eff...
The New Deal. Kathryn A. Flynn. A New Deal for Native Art: Indian Arts and Federal Policy, 1933-1943. Jennifer McLerran. The WPA: Creating Jobs and Hope in the Great Depression. Sandra Opdycke. The Living New Deal. Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. A New Deal For The Arts. The National Archives.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s pragmatic New Deal Program aimed to put US citizens back on their feet and back to work, and also included an innovative and lively public arts program designed to provide economic relief and jobs for artists of all walks.
Many politically active artists worked for the New Deal projects. United by a desire to use art to promote social change, these artists sympathized with the labor movement and exhibited an affinity for left-wing politics ranging from New Deal liberalism to socialism to communism.
This exhibition describes and displays the work of the New Deal arts projects and discusses themes common to this government-sponsored art. The paintings, prints, books, playbills, posters, and music transcriptions displayed here are more than artifacts and documents of an emergency work program.
1934: The Art of the New Deal. An exhibition of Depression-era paintings by federally-funded artists provides a hopeful view of life during economic travails
