CategoriesStyles and Movements
Works Progress Administration (WPA)
The New Deal agency whose Federal Art Project employed thousands of American artists from 1935 to 1943 to make public art.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for Works Progress Administration (WPA) are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
The Works Progress Administration, created in 1935 as part of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, put millions of unemployed Americans to work. Its Federal Art Project, directed by Holger Cahill, extended the idea to painters, sculptors, printmakers and designers, paying them to make murals, easel paintings, posters and prints for public buildings and to teach in community art centres from Harlem to Chicago's South Side. The Index of American Design recorded folk art and crafts in thousands of watercolour plates.
The project sustained a generation. Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko drew wages from it; Arshile Gorky painted murals for Newark Airport; Jacob Lawrence and Alice Neel worked in its easel division. Its New York print workshop helped make screenprinting a fine-art medium. The label often stretches to other New Deal programmes, including the Farm Security Administration photographs of Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein and Gordon Parks.
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