New Deal Accomplishment: Over 4,400 Murals


Above: A mural created by WPA artist Gustave Dalstrom, between 1935 and 1943, at the Laurel School kindergarten, Wilmette, Illinois. Photo from the National Archives.


Above: A WPA mural to boost the spirits of kids convalescing at the Children's Hospital in Portland, Maine, 1936. Photo from the National Archives.


Above: A WPA poster, promoting an exhibit of mural studies. Poster created between 1936 and 1937. Image from the Library of Congress.


Above: "Arrival of First Train in Herrington – 1885," a mural study for the post office building in Herrington, Kansas, created by Harry Louis Freund while he was in the New Deal's Section of Painting and Sculpture, ca. 1937. Image from the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

4,400+ Murals

The New Deal sought to beautify America, tell its history, and cheer-up, educate, or inspire its people with numerous works of art, for example, murals placed in schools, hospitals, post offices, and other public buildings. Using reports from the respective agencies (most of which are on the Living New Deal's website, here) we find that artists in the Public Works of Art Project created 706 murals; in the Treasury Section of Painting and Sculpture (later named "Section of Fine Arts"), 1,047; in the WPA, 2,566; and in the Treasury Relief Art Project, 89.

This gives us a total of 4,408. But this is a conservative number. For example, I have not counted the 428 murals created by artists funded by the Work Division of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (1934-1935) because some percentage of these--large or small we may never know--were completions of murals begun under the Public Works of Art Project.

Many of the New Deal's 4,400+ murals still exist today, still catching eyes, creating smiles, and telling the story of America.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

New Deal Accomplishment: 1,383 new hospitals and treatment facilities

Image
Above: The New Deal's Public Works Administration (PWA) provided funding for the new and massive "Charity Hospital" in New Orleans, 1938. In total, PWA funded about 822 "hospitals and institutions for medical treatment" (Public Works Administration, America Builds: The Record of PWA , Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, p. 291 ). Photo from the National Archives . Above: Most Americans have forgotten, or have never been taught in the first place, or in some cases don't seem to care, how New Deal hospitals and health workers brought their parents or grandparents into the world, treated their injuries and broken bones, diagnosed their illnesses, provided the necessary facilities to perform life-saving surgeries, etc. The description for the photograph above reads, "Jackson Memorial Hospital, constructed by PWA in Miami, Florida. The picture shows the nursery room of the hospital." Photo from the National Archives . Above: This photo a...
Read more

New Deal Accomplishment: 2.5 billion trees planted

Image
Above: The description for this ca. 1938 photograph reads: "Planting crews in action near Dunlap [Texas] shown at work in the general type of country in which plantings of shelter belts of trees, against wind erosion, are being made by relief workers - many of them farmers employed on the U.S. Forest Service-WPA Prairie States Forestry Project. About 500 WPA workers were so employed in northwest Texas alone in 1938. Similar work is in progress in other prairie states of the region west of the Mississippi River." Photo from the National Archives . Above: The description for this photo, also ca. 1938, reads: "Two-year-old shelterbelt near Memphis [Texas], planted by relief workers employed under the U.S. Forest Service-WPA Prairie States Forestry Project. Center rows of cottonwood flanked by Chinese elm, honey locust and Osage orange. The man shown in the picture is standing between the honey locust rows."  Photo from the National Archives . Above: A CCC camp and t...
Read more