The Federal Art Project (1935–1943) was a New Deal program to fund the visual arts in the United States. Under national director Holger Cahill, it was one of five Federal Project Number One projects sponsored by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and the largest of the New Deal art projects. It was created not as a cultural activity, but as a relief measure to employ artists and artisans to create murals, easel paintings, sculpture, graphic art, posters, photography, theatre scenic design, and arts and crafts. The WPA Federal Art Project established more than 100 community art centers throughout the country, researched and documented American design, commissioned a significant body of public art without restriction to content or subject matter, and sustained some 10,000 artists and craft workers during the Great Depression. According to American Heritage, “Something like 400,000 easel paintings, murals, prints, posters, and renderings were produced by WPA artists during the eight years of the project’s existence, virtually free of government pressure to control subject matter, interpretation, or style.”

Background

Hundreds of thousands of artworks were commissioned under the Federal Art Project. 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 and works with the FBI and art community to identify and recover WPA art. In 2010, it produced a 22-minute documentary about the WPA Art Recovery Project, "Returning America’s Art to America", narrated by Charles Osgood.

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

See also

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

References

Further reading

  • 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
  • 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,
  • Russo, Jillian. "The Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project Reconsidered." Visual Resources 34.1-2 (2018): 13-32.
  • 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 – 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