The Great Depression reached its peak in 1933 when the unemployment rate in the United States plummeted to 20%. The Public Works of Art Project, a relief measure to employ artists, was one of many New Deal initiatives that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed into law during his first year in office. In 1935, the program was replaced by the Federal Art Project, which was administered by the Works Progress Administration. Together, the two programs employed more than 10,000 artists and generated an estimated 400,000 paintings, murals, prints, and posters. The Everson Museum of Art (then the Syracuse Museum of Fine Arts) played an important role as Museum Director Anna Wetherill Olmsted oversaw the Central New York region of the Federal Art Project.
Putting Art to Work features more than sixty prints made under the auspices of the Public Works of Art Project and the Federal Art Project between 1934 and 1942. Most of the prints in the Everson’s collection were donated to the Museum by the Public Works of Art Project of New York City, but Putting Art to Work includes key loans from the Syracuse University Art Museum, the Tyler Art Gallery at SUNY Oswego, the Picker Art Gallery at Colgate University, and the Onondaga Historical Association that show the program’s economic and cultural impact on our region’s public institutions and artists.
Putting Art to Work: Prints of the Works Progress Administration, Photo: Jamie Young
This exhibition was made possible by a Humanities New York Action Grant, a subset of the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Everson is supported by the Dorothy and Marshall M. Reisman Foundation; the General Operating Support program, a regrant program of the County of Onondaga with the support of County Executive, J. Ryan McMahon II, and the Onondaga County Legislature, administered by CNY Arts; and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
