The Public Works of Art Project

As part of the New Deal, the U.S. government created a short-lived Civil Works Administration to organize manual labor jobs for millions of workers in the fall of 1933. Lesser known amongst the efforts of the Administration was the Public Works of Art Project, a subdivision of its funding efforts aimed at providing work to the nation's artists.

Directed by Edward Bruce, who himself had quit his job as an artist and become a lobbyist as a result of the Depression, the Project spent $1.3 million over six months providing jobs to artists across the country, with a focus on the decoration of public buildings and parks. The jobs provided stretched across fifty states, paying approximately 40 dollars a week and encompassing the creation of murals, paintings, and sculptures, many of which remain in place today.

While it can be viewed as a matter of practicality similar to the reinstatement of jobs for manual laborers, the Project was different in its fundamental nature than many of its sister programs. Before that time, artists were viewed as inessential members of society; their works might be influential and thought-provoking, but little attention was paid to their welfare, and certainly the government would never allocate resources to them in stead of laborers who produced practical infrastructure and goods. But men with ties to the presidency used funding from the New Deal to try to erode those assumptions.

Diego Rivera's 1922 work Creation, the first of his murals to be commissioned by the government of Mexico. The mural still stands in San Ildefonso College in Mexico City.

Over a decade before, a recovering, civil war-torn Mexico began sponsoring the work of artists like Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siquieros, and Jose Clemente Orozco, paying them to paint murals with nationalist themes to encourage an atmosphere of national unity. Now world-renowned for their repurposing of Aztec artistic traditions, the murals inspired a slightly different revolution up north.

George Biddle, a surrealist painter who attended boarding school with Franklin D. Roosevelt, had observed the Mexican mural project on a trip to the country. Seeing the plight of Depression-era artists, he implored Roosevelt to pass a similar initiative. He framed the idea as more than just a job creator; as in Mexico, an American government-funded arts initiative could be used to sell the vision of the country enshrined in the New Deal.

The initiative intertwined nicely with the concomitant emergence of the American Scene, an artistic movement that aimed to display the day-to-day of working-class Americans. By placing such displays in public areas, the government could promote a vision of the country centered around working-class communities, emphasizing to the poor majority that their contributions to the nation were as if not more significant than that of the wealthy individuals whose lives were usually preserved by the art community.

Learn more about the American Scene, which incorporated artists like Norman Rockwell and works such as American Gothic.

The Project was succeeded by multiple, more long-lived arts programs, including the Section of Fine Arts, which lasted until 1943. But its legacy is to be viewed in terms of its longer-term implications: most notably, the viability of the American government's patronage of the arts.

Perhaps the most notable nearby example of Project Artwork is the set of murals painted onto the interior of Coit Tower in San Francisco. The bottom-floor murals, which are the only set easily accessible to the public, depicts the Depression-era lives of the working class.


https://www.britannica.com/topic/Public-Works-of-Art-Project
http://www.ushistory.org/us/49b.asp
http://depts.washington.edu/depress/PWAP.shtml
http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/americanscene/
http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Recalling-the-creation-of-Coit-Tower-s-murals-3381186.php