The Art of the New Deal

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

When she first discovered the WPA posters, “they just blew my mind,” Carter says. “There was so much parallel to what I was doing as an organizer, and what these WPA guys were doing. I fell in love with the style.”

Eventually, she wound up on eBay, where for $500 she purchased an antifascist poster produced by the division. As she built her own collection, she was surprised at the lack of information regarding the poster division’s history. Apart from the archive at the Library of Congress, there was little to go on. When she got in touch with archive staff to share her growing collection, they expressed little interest. “I asked, ‘Do you want to know about these?’ They politely declined, and I was outraged.”

Ever the activist, she turned her anger into action, launching an ambitious project to digitize all the WPA posters tucked away in historical societies, government subdivisions, and private collections, and to make the images available to the American people, who funded their creation in the first place.

The WPA Living Archive will illustrate the transition in American graphic design from the relatively fussy, intellectual traditions of the early part of the 20th century to the pragmatic modernism that has come to dominate. One needn’t look too hard to see these aesthetics used today to sell software or soft drinks instead of reinforcing social values like civic involvement or good health.

“The idea of values in our country has been co-opted,” Carter says. “It’s important to remember our history of secular, progressive values. When you see a [WPA] poster promoting an amateur roller-derby contest, for example, it says something—it was important for the government to promote this event because it made people happy.” Today, the only analogous imagery in our culture is advertising, Carter says.

Many of the graphic artists who worked in the poster division in fact took their skills into the world of advertising. When World War II came and, with it, better economic times, many WPA programs, including the poster division, were converted to wartime purposes or shut down altogether.

With the demise of the division, much of its work was lost forever. “By the truckload, the posters were dumped,” Carter says. “Even today, if I call up a historical society to ask about WPA posters, they might say, ‘Yeah, we think we have a box in the basement.’ ”

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print