TheFederal Art Project (1935–1943) was aNew Deal program to fund thevisual arts in the United States. Under national directorHolger Cahill, it was one of fiveFederal Project Number One projects sponsored by theWorks 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 ofpublic art without restriction to content or subject matter, and sustained some 10,000 artists and craft workers during theGreat Depression. According toAmerican 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.”[1]
Poster summarizing Federal Art Project employment and activities (November 1, 1936)
The Workers (c. 1935), a wall hanging created byFlorence Kawa for the Milwaukee Handicraft Project, was presented toEleanor 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 theEmergency 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.
The WPA program made no distinction betweenrepresentational andnonrepresentational 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 asJackson 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. HistorianJohn 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 theMuseum of Wisconsin Art mounted an exhibition of items created by the Milwaukee Handicraft Project, furniture from it was still being used at theMilwaukee Public Library.[9]
Holger Cahill was national director of the Federal Art Project. Other administrators includedAudrey 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] andRobert 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 theBuffalo Zoo expansion.[15]
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.
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 theearly 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.[162]: 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 [163] 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-centurytrompe-l'œil painters asWilliam Harnett; lesser works represent the process of artists who were given employment and expert training.[162]: xiv
"It was not a nostalgic or antiquarian enterprise," wrote historianRoger 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
Like all WPA programs, the Index had the primary purpose of providing employment.[164] 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.[165]
"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."[162]: xv
The Index of American Design operated in 34 states and the District of Columbia from 1935 to 1942. It was founded byRomana Javitz, head of the Picture Collection of theNew York Public Library, and textile designerRuth 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.[162]: xii The work is in the collection of theNational Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.[166]
The Index employed an average of 300 artists during its six years in operation.[162]: 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."[167]
Panel from reredos at the Church of Sanctuario at Chimayo
Fly Catcher, 1937. Frank McEntee. National Gallery of Art
Magnus Fossum copying the 1770Boston Town Coverlet (February 1940)
Boston Town Coverlet Magnus Fossum (1935–1942)
Poke Bonnet,Irene Lawson. Index of American Design. National Gallery of Art
The WPA Poster Division was headed byRichard Floethe.[168] 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.[169][168] 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.[168] According to preeminent New Deal art historianFrancis V. O’Connor, only about 2,000 surviving examples of WPA poster art are held in the nation’s library and museum print collections.[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, theGeneral Services Administration (GSA) maintains an inventory[171] and works with the FBI and art community to identify and recover WPA art.[172] In 2010, it produced a 22-minute documentary about the WPA Art Recovery Project, "Returning America’s Art to America", narrated byCharles Osgood.[173]
In July 2014, the GSA estimated that only 20,000 of the portable works have been located to date.[171][174] In 2015, GSA investigators found 122 Federal Art Project paintings in California libraries, where most had been stored and forgotten.[175]
^"The Artist and His Life".The Artwork of Benjamin Abramowitz (1917–2011). S.A. Rosenbaum & Associates. Archived fromthe original on 2015-08-12. Retrieved2015-06-16.
^"Abe Ajay,Industry".The Collection Online. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Retrieved2015-06-22.
^Megraw, Richard (January 10, 2011)."Federal Art Project".KnowLA Encyclopedia of Louisiana. Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. Archived fromthe original on September 15, 2015. Retrieved2015-10-25.
^Abbott, Leala (December 2004)."Arts and Culture, Art Center records 1930–2004, Finding Aid".Milstein/Rosenthal Center for Media & Technology.92nd Street Y. Archived fromthe original on 2015-06-21. Retrieved2015-06-21.In 1935 and 1936, 92Y, in cooperation with the federal Works Progress Administration (W.P.A.) and the New York City Board of Education, began offering free courses … The Contemporary Art Center, part of the W.P.A.'s Federal Art Project, offered daytime courses for serious art students and was led by Nathaniel Dirk.
^Drawing on America's Past: Folk Art, Modernism, and the Index of American Design by Virginia Tuttle Clayton, Elizabeth Stillinger,Erika Doss, and Deborah Chotner. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2002.
^abcdDeNoon, Christopher (1987).Posters of the WPA. Francis V. O'Connor. Los Angeles: Wheatley Press, in association with the University of Washington Press, Seattle.ISBN0-295-96543-6.OCLC16558529.
^Carter, Ennis (2008).Posters for the people : art of the WPA. Christopher DeNoon, Alexander M. Peltz. Philadelphia, PA: Quirk Books.ISBN978-1-59474-292-7.OCLC227919759.
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.ISBN978-0-8478-3089-3.
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,ISBN978-0-8131-5567-8
Russo, Jillian. "The Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project Reconsidered."Visual Resources 34.1-2 (2018): 13-32.
Returning America’s Art to America,General Services Administration[170]
