Public Works of Art Project Murals

PUBLIC WORKS OF ART PROJECT MURALS

The Federal Art Project

Like its counterparts, the Federal Theatre, Writers, Dance, and Music Projects, the Federal Art Project (FAP) was a part of the Works Progress Administration. Preceded by the Public Works of Art Project in 1933 and 1934, founded in 1935, drastically reduced in 1939, and eliminated entirely in 1943, the FAP was responsible for more than 2,500 murals, 11,000 designs, 108,000 easels, and 17,000 sculptures. Perhaps the most famous of all of these endeavors, however, were the commissioned murals of the FAP,

Public Works of Art Project

In 1933 artist George Biddle, known as the father of federal arts projects, wrote a letter to his old classmate Franklin Delano Roosevelt, suggesting a series of publicly commissioned murals by young American artists—murals that would express American ideals and the social vision of the New Deal. The result, after the usual political battles had been fought and won, was the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), which, with its successor, the Federal Art Project, was to be responsible for more than twenty-five hundred murals in schools, post offices, federal buildings, and other public spaces throughout the nation. These murals were painted by a range of distinguished and soon-to-be-distinguished artists, including Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, Willem de Kooning, Reginald Marsh, Jackson Pollock, Rockwell Kent, Philip Guston, and Stuart Davis. In Oklahoma Kiowa Indians painted murals at two state colleges depicting subject matter from their religious rituals and festivals. While perhaps chiefly inspired by Diego Rivera and other Mexican muralists active in the 1920s, scholars have also detected the influence of Italian Renaissance styles, French academicians and abstractionists, and Asian decorators in the murals. The PWAP artists painted murals that reflected a wide range of aesthetic styles, including both realistic and nonrepresentational elements.

A New Vision

Perhaps most of the PWAP and FAP painters were, like so many other artists and intellectuals, deeply engaged in creating a new vision of American life. While heroic workers and smiling children certainly occupied their share of space in these murals, so did the poor, the homeless, and a range of historical figures, such as Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. Many murals were controversial: industrialists in Kellogg, Idaho, condemned Fletcher Martin's design, "Mine Rescue;' while officials of the Mine Workers and Smelt Workers Union praised it: the industrialists prevailed, and Martin substituted a design depicting the arrival of a local prospector, for whom the town was named. In Watango, Oklahoma, Cheyenne Indians pitched a tepee on the post-office lawn until Edith Mahier changed the Indian ponies on her mural, which Chief Red Bird complained looked like "oversized swans." However, on the whole the murals received, and continue to receive, their share of acclaim on social and aesthetic grounds, both from critics and from grateful citizens, including the post-master of Pleasant Hill, Missouri, who wrote: "In behalf of many smaller cities, wholly without objects of art, as ours was, may I beseech you and the Treasury to give them some art, more of it, whenever you find it possible to do so. How can a finished citizen be made in an artless town?"

Sources:

Richard D. McKinzie, The New Deal for Artists (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973);

Barbara Melosh, Engendering Culture: Manhood and Womanhood in New Deal Public Art and Theater (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991).