Federal Art Project

Poster summarizing Federal Art Project employment and activities (November 1, 1936)

The Workers (c. 1935), a wall hanging created by Florence Kawa for the Milwaukee Handicraft Project, was presented to Eleanor Roosevelt[2]^: 164

The Federal Art Project was the visual arts arm of Federal Project Number One, a program of the Works Progress Administration, which was intended to provide employment for struggling artists during the Great Depression. Funded under the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935, it operated from August 29, 1935, until June 30, 1943. It was created as a relief measure to employ artists and artisans to create murals, easel paintings, sculpture, graphic art, posters, photographs, Index of American Design documentation, museum and theatre scenic design, and arts and crafts. The Federal Art Project operated community art centers throughout the country where craft workers and artists worked, exhibited, and educated others.[3] The project created more than 200,000 separate works, some of them remaining among the most significant pieces of public art in the country.[4]

The Federal Art Project's primary goals were to employ out-of-work artists and to provide art for nonfederal municipal buildings and public spaces. Artists were paid $23.60 a week; tax-supported institutions such as schools, hospitals, and public buildings paid only for materials.[5] The work was divided into art production, art instruction, and art research. The primary output of the art-research group was the Index of American Design, a mammoth and comprehensive study of American material culture.

As many as 10,000 artists were commissioned to produce work for the WPA Federal Art Project,[6] the largest of the New Deal art projects. Three comparable but distinctly separate New Deal art projects were administered by the United States Department of the Treasury: the Public Works of Art Project (1933–1934), the Section of Painting and Sculpture (1934–1943), and the Treasury Relief Art Project (1935–1938).[7]

The WPA program made no distinction between representational and nonrepresentational art. Abstraction had not yet gained favor in the 1930s and 1940s, so was virtually unsalable. As a result, the Federal Art Project supported such iconic artists as Jackson Pollock before their work could earn them income.[8]

One particular success was the Milwaukee Handicraft Project, which started in 1935 as an experiment that employed 900 people who were classified as unemployable due to their age or disability.[2]^: 164 The project came to employ about 5,000 unskilled workers, many of them women and the long-term unemployed. Historian John Gurda observed that the city's unemployment hovered at 40% in 1933. "In that year," he said, "53 percent of Milwaukee's property taxes went unpaid because people just could not afford to make the tax payments."[9] Workers were taught bookbinding, block printing, and design, which they used to create handmade art books and children's books. They produced toys, dolls,[10] theatre costumes, quilts,[9] rugs, draperies, wall hangings, and furniture that were purchased by schools, hospitals,[2]^: 164 and municipal organizations[11] for the cost of materials only.[12] In 2014, when the Museum of Wisconsin Art mounted an exhibition of items created by the Milwaukee Handicraft Project, furniture from it was still being used at the Milwaukee Public Library.[9]

Holger Cahill was national director of the Federal Art Project. Other administrators included Audrey McMahon, director of the New York Region (New York, New Jersey, and Philadelphia); Clement B. Haupers, director for Minnesota;[13] George Godfrey Thorp (Illinois),[14] and Robert Bruce Inverarity, director for Washington. Regional New York supervisors of the Federal Art Project have included sculptor William Ehrich (1897–1960) of the Buffalo Unit (1938–1939), project director of the Buffalo Zoo expansion.[15]

Some 10,000 artists were commissioned to work for the Federal Art Project.[6] Notable artists include the following:

Jacksonville Negro Art Center, Jacksonville, Florida

Eleanor Roosevelt at the dedication of the South Side Community Art Center, Chicago, Illinois (May 7, 1941)

Poster for the opening of the Mason City Art Center, Mason City, Iowa (1941)

Children's art class at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota

American design exhibit at the Roswell Museum and Art Center, Roswell, New Mexico (1941)

Poster for the Harlem Community Art Center, New York City (1938)

Class at the Harlem Community Art Center (January 1, 1938)

Poster for the open house of the Greensboro Art Center, Greensboro, North Carolina (1937)

Oklahoma Art Center, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

Curry County Art Center, Gold Beach, Oregon

The first federally sponsored community art center opened in December 1936 in Raleigh, North Carolina.[154]

Federal Art Project Illinois poster for an exhibition of the Index of American Design

As we study the drawings of the Index of American Design we realize that the hands that made the first two hundred years of this country's material culture expressed something more than untutored creative instinct and the rude vigor of a frontier civilization. … The Index, in bringing together thousands of particulars from various sections of the country, tells the story of American hand skills and traces intelligible patterns within that story.

— Holger Cahill, national director of the Federal Art Project[160]^: xv

The Index of American Design program of the Federal Art Project produced a pictorial survey of the crafts and decorative arts of the United States from the early colonial period to 1900. Artists working for the Index produced nearly 18,000 meticulously faithful watercolor drawings,[2]^: 226 documenting material culture by largely anonymous artisans.[160]^: ix Objects surveyed ranged from furniture, silver, glass, stoneware and textiles to tavern signs, ships's figureheads, cigar-store figures, carousel horses, toys, tools and weather vanes.[2]^: 224[161] Photography was used only to a limited degree since artists could more accurately and effectively present the form, character, color and texture of the objects. The best drawings approach the work of such 19th-century trompe-l'œil painters as William Harnett; lesser works represent the process of artists who were given employment and expert training.[160]^: xiv

"It was not a nostalgic or antiquarian enterprise," wrote historian Roger G. Kennedy. "It was initiated by modernists dedicated to abstract design, hoping to influence industrial design — thus in many ways it parallelled the founding philosophy of the Museum of Modern Art in New York."[2]^: 224

Holger Cahill, national director of the Federal Art Project, speaking at the Harlem Community Art Center (October 24, 1938)

Like all WPA programs, the Index had the primary purpose of providing employment.[162] Its function was to identify and record material of historical significance that had not been studied and was in danger of being lost. Its aim was to gather together these pictorial records into a body of material that would form the basis for organic development of American design — a usable American past accessible to artists, designers, manufacturers, museums, libraries and schools. The United States had no single comprehensive collection of authenticated historical native design comparable to those available to scholars, artists and industrial designers in Europe.[163]

"In one sense the Index is a kind of archaeology," wrote Holger Cahill. "It helps to correct a bias which has tended to relegate the work of the craftsman and the folk artist to the subconscious of our history where it can be recovered only by digging. In the past we have lost whole sequences out of their story, and have all but forgotten the unique contribution of hand skills in our culture."[160]^: xv

The Index of American Design operated in 34 states and the District of Columbia from 1935 to 1942. It was founded by Romana Javitz, head of the Picture Collection of the New York Public Library, and textile designer Ruth Reeves.[2]^: 224 Reeves was appointed the first national coordinator; she was succeeded by C. Adolph Glassgold (1936) and Benjamin Knotts (1940). Constance Rourke was national editor.[160]^: xii The work is in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.[164]

The Index employed an average of 300 artists during its six years in operation.[160]^: xiv One artist was Magnus S. Fossum, a longtime farmer who was compelled by the Depression to move from the Midwest to Florida. After he lost his left hand in an accident in 1934, he produced watercolor renderings for the Index, using magnifiers and drafting instruments for accuracy and precision. Fossum eventually received an insurance settlement that made it possible for him to buy another farm and leave the Federal Art Project.[2]^: 228

In her essay,'Picturing a Usable Past,' Virginia Tuttle Clayton, curator of the 2002-2003 exhibition, Drawing on America's Past: Folk Art, Modernism, and the Index of American Design, held at the National Gallery of Art noted that "the Index of American Design was the result of an ambitious and creative effort to furnish for the visual arts a usable past."[165]

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  church of sanctuario at chimayo-panel from reredos
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  Fly Catcher, 1937.Frank McEntee - National Gallery of Art.
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  Magnus Fossum copying the 1770 Boston Town Coverlet (February 1940)
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  Boston Town Coverlet
  Magnus Fossum (1935–1942)
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  Poke Bonnet,Irene Lawson. Index of American Design.National Gallery of Art
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  Daguerreotype Case Index of American Design
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  "Age of Chivalry" Circus Wagon, c. 1938
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  Noah's Ark with animals-Sunday toy

WPA poster advertising art classes for children

The WPA Poster Division was headed by Richard Floethe.[166] The WPA Poster Division is thought to have produced upward of 35,000 designs and printed some two million posters, originally by hand but quickly transitioning to widespread adoption of the silkscreen process.[167][166] The Poster Division began in New York City and by 1938 had artists in 18 states; the Chicago unit was the second-most productive after New York.[166] According to preeminent New Deal art historian Francis V. O’Connor, only about 2,000 surviving examples of WPA poster art are held in the nation’s library and museum print collections.[166]

External video
Returning America’s Art to America, General Services Administration[168]

Hundreds of thousands of artworks were commissioned under the Federal Art Project.[6] Many of the portable works have been lost, abandoned, or given away as unauthorized gifts. As custodian of the work, which remains federal property, the General Services Administration (GSA) maintains an inventory[169] and works with the FBI and art community to identify and recover WPA art.[170] In 2010, it produced a 22-minute documentary about the WPA Art Recovery Project, "Returning America’s Art to America", narrated by Charles Osgood.[171]

In July 2014, the GSA estimated that only 20,000 of the portable works have been located to date.[169][172] In 2015, GSA investigators found 122 Federal Art Project paintings in California libraries, where most had been stored and forgotten.[173]

• List of Federal Art Project artists
• Section of Painting and Sculpture
• Public Works of Art Project
• Farm Security Administration which employed photographers.

• DeNoon, Christopher. Posters of the WPA (Los Angeles: Wheatley Press, 1987).
• Grieve, Victoria. The Federal Art Project and the Creation of Middlebrow Culture (2009) excerpt
• Kennedy, Roger G.; David Larkin (2009). When art worked. New York: Rizzoli. ISBN 978-0-8478-3089-3.
• Kelly, Andrew, Kentucky by Design: American Culture, the Decorative Arts and the Federal Art Project's Index of American Design, University Press of Kentucky, 2015, ISBN 978-0-8131-5567-8
• Russo, Jillian. "The Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project Reconsidered." Visual Resources 34.1-2 (2018): 13-32.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Federal Art Project.

• The Living New Deal research project and online public archive at the University of California, Berkeley
• Recovering America's Art for America (2010), General Services Administration short documentary about efforts to recover WPA art
• Posters for the People, online archive of WPA posters
• WPA Posters collection at the Library of Congress
• New Deal Art Registry
• wpamurals.com Archived 2012-12-05 at archive.today – links to each state, with examples of WPA art in each
• Federal Art Project Photographic Division collection at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art
• "1934: A New Deal for Artists" Exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum
• “Art Within Reach”: Federal Art Project Community Art Centers at George Mason University
• WPA Murals and American Abstract Artists at American Abstract Artists
• WPA Prints and Murals in New York
• Collection: "Art of the Works Progress Administration WPA" from the University of Michigan Museum of Art
• WNYC and the WPA Federal Art Project