The Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) was a program to employ artists, as part of the New Deal, during the Great Depression. The program was headed by Edward Bruce, under the United States Treasury Department with funding from the Civil Works Administration. The PWAP ran from 1933 to 1934 and was a New Deal program during the period of the Great Depression. The PWAP served as way to employ artists, while having competent representatives of the profession display their work in a public setting. Although the program lasted less than one year, it had employed 3,700 artists, who produced nearly 15,000 works of art. In an art exhibition that featured 451 paintings commissioned by the PWAP, 30 percent of the artists featured were in their twenties, and 25 percent were first-generation immigrants.
Stevan Dohanos was an American artist and illustrator of the social realism school, best known for his Saturday Evening Post covers, and responsible for several of the Don't Talk set of World War II propaganda posters. He named Grant Wood and Edward Hopper as the greatest influences on his painting.
Anton Refregier was a painter and muralist active in Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project commissions, and in teaching art. He was a Russian immigrant to the United States.
Edward Bright Bruce was the director of the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), the Section of Painting and Sculpture and the Treasury Relief Art Project, New Deal relief efforts that provided work for artists in the United States during the Great Depression. Ned Bruce was a successful lawyer and entrepreneur before giving up his career altogether at the age of 43 to become an artist. However, like most artists during the Depression, he found it impossible to make a living making art, and grudgingly returned to business in 1932 as a lobbyist in Washington for the Calamba Sugar Estate of San Francisco. In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt received a letter from the American painter George Biddle, who suggested a New Deal program that would hire artists to paint murals in federal office buildings. Roosevelt was intrigued by the idea, and brought the idea to the United States Treasury Department, which oversaw all construction of federal buildings. Bruce had by that time made some connections in Washington, and he was asked to help organize the effort. By the end of 1943, all of the New Deal art programs had been shut down following Bruce's death.
Louise Emerson Ronnebeck was an American painter best known for her murals executed for the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, she married artist Arnold Ronnebeck (1885–1947) in 1926 and they settled in Denver, Colorado. In Denver she built a successful career documenting western American history and social issues of the 1930s and 1940s.
The Wall Street crash of 1929 left many artists in the United States unemployed. Collectors who normally could afford to purchase such luxury items no longer had the means to do so. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal program created funding for art projects which would inspire confidence in American life and history. The program's objective was to hire artists to create works of art for display in public buildings throughout the country. From 1934 to 1943, there were various federally funded programs for artists in New Mexico – the Treasury Section of Painting and Sculpture, the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), the Works Progress Administration (WPA)/Federal Art Project (WPA/FAP), and the Treasury Relief Art Project (TRAP).
United States post office murals are notable examples of New Deal art produced during the years 1934–1943.
Gustaf Dalstrom (1893-1971) was an American artist and muralist. From 1927, he served as president of the Chicago Society of Artists. During the Great Depression he contributed several mural paintings to public schools and post offices through the Treasury Department Section of Painting and Sculpture. One of his murals that can still be viewed today is The Great Indian Council - 1833. The mural was originally featured in 1938, paired with a mural his wife, Frances Foy, created in The Old Main Post Office of Chicago. The Great Indian Council - 1833 can be viewed in the current location of the South Loop Post Office in Chicago, Illinois.
George Snow Hill (1898–1969) was a painter and sculptor in the United States known as a muralist. He lived in St. Petersburg, Florida until his death in 1969. He founded the Hill School of Art in St. Petersburg in 1946.
Frances Foy was an American painter, muralist, illustrator, and etcher born in Chicago, Illinois.
Miriam McKinnie, aka Miriam McKinnie Hofmeier was an American artist.
Richard Haines was an American New Deal muralist.
Rainey Bennett was an American artist, illustrator and muralist. His works have been displayed in major museum art collections.
Helen Katharine Forbes was a Californian artist and arts educator specializing in etching, murals and painting. She is best known for western landscapes, portrait paintings, and her murals with the Treasury Section of Fine Arts and Work Progress Administration (WPA). Forbes was skilled in painting in oil, watercolor, and egg tempera. She painted landscapes of Mexico, Mono Lake and the Sierras in the 1920s, desert scenes of Death Valley in the 1930s, and portraits and still-lifes.
The Treasury Relief Art Project (TRAP) was a New Deal arts program that commissioned visual artists to provide artistic decoration for existing Federal buildings during the Great Depression in the United States. A project of the United States Department of the Treasury, TRAP was administered by the Section of Painting and Sculpture and funded by the Works Progress Administration, which provided assistants employed through the Federal Art Project. The Treasury Relief Art Project also created murals and sculpture for Public Works Administration housing projects. TRAP was established July 21, 1935, and continued through June 30, 1938.
Tracy Montminy, who completed early works as Elizabeth Tracy, (1911–1992) was an American artist and muralist. During the WPA's era, she painted murals in civic buildings, including murals in the library in Cambridge, Massachusetts; the fire and police building of Saugus, Massachusetts; the Milton, Massachusetts post office; Medford, Massachusetts City Hall; the post office of Downers Grove, Illinois; and the post office in Kennebunkport, Maine, as well as others both in the U.S. and abroad. She was an art instructor at the University of Missouri and the American University of Beirut, continuing her own painting projects simultaneously with her teaching into the 1980s. Upon her death, she established a trust to create the Montminy Art Gallery in Columbia, Missouri.
Grant Wright Christian was an American artist. He graduated from the John Herron Art Institute in 1933 and later attended the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts from which he received the Thouron Prize.
New Deal artwork is an umbrella term used to describe the creative output organized and funded by the Roosevelt administration’s New Deal response to the Great Depression. This work produced between 1933 and 1942 ranges in content and form from Dorothea Lange’s photographs for the Farm Security Administration to the Coit Tower murals to the library-etiquette posters from the Federal Art Project to the architecture of the Solomon Courthouse in Nashville, Tennessee. The New Deal sought to “democratize the arts” and is credited with creating a “great body of distinguished work and fostering a national aesthetic.”
