The “Work” of Art in American Culture from the New Deal to Now

To mark the 90^th anniversary of Federal One, the collective name for federally-funded cultural projects established under the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in 1935, this session explores a history of art focused on labor. In response to financial crisis and a liquidated art market during the Great Depression, the Roosevelt Administration inaugurated watershed federal initiatives that ensured the survival of artists and the growth of art industry infrastructure nationally through the Public Works of Art Project (1933-1934), the Treasury Section of Fine Art (1934-1943); the Treasury Relief Art Project (1935-1938); and the largest of these experimental investments, the WPA (1935-1943), which sponsored the Federal One projects for Art, Writing, Music and Theater. While short-lived, such federal patronage produced an immense body of publicly owned art, and, unofficially, a newfound sense of collectivism, seeming to promise a transformation of existing relations between artists, audiences, and patrons. Examples include artists identifying themselves as “cultural workers” or labor allies, many of whom joined the pre-Civil-Rights-era coalitions that worked to redress social, economic, and racial inequalities across the country. This session invites papers that reflect upon the tangible and intangible labor legacies of the New Deal’s experimental art programs, including the creative output of federal programs modeled after them: the NEA (1960s), unemployment relief for artists under CETA (1970s) and the American Recovery Act (2020s), among others. We anticipate setting aside close looking at saleable art objects and chronologically ordered aesthetic innovation to focus instead on issues of class, labor relations, and labor identity.