The WPA’s Visual Legacy

The Works Progress Administration (WPA) was a New Deal initiative launched in 1935, in the heart of the Great Depression, to combat widespread unemployment and raise national morale, and which, over the course of eight years, employed over 8 million Americans who built roads, dams, sewers, and bridges, and other infrastructure; who designed buildings; who maintained and improved National Parks; who played music and performed plays; who taught children how to read and paint; and who made murals, posters, and other art depicting the American experience and propagating the value of work.

And yet this list barely touches on the scope of the WPA’s impact on American life and culture. To celebrate its legacy, we’re presenting some images of the design and painting the WPA commissioned, along with a few photographs of people carrying out WPA projects in the field. In addition to what’s included here, we encourage you to click here for a catalog of (some of) the architectural riches resulting from the WPA that remain with us.

Happy Labor Day!

Workers in a machine shop
Electrification. By David Stone Martin, Treasury Section of Fine Arts, 1940, Tempera on cardboard. Fine Arts Collection, General Services Administration
Building a road
Theatre poster
Building a road
Paleontology!
History of Southern Illinois. By Paul Kelpe, Illinois Federal Art Project, WPA, ca. 1935-39 Gouache
Textile workers at the loom
Workers building a sewage system
WPA band playing a free concert in Lafayette Square, New Orleans
Chris Davidson

Chris Davidson

Chris Davidson's chapbook of poetry Easy Meal was published by Californios Press in summer of 2020. He lives in Long Beach, CA, and has worked at The Curator, first as poetry editor and later as gener