In addition to WPA prints and photographs taken by artists who were employed by the Farm Security Administration, this installation also includes examples of works by other WPA and Federal Arts Project artists from the museum's permanent collection.
Our current economic situation has been compared with the Great Depression in the 1930s, and similar to that period, the arts were not and could not be stifled. In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed the New Deal, a series of programs that sought recovery for the economic crisis by creating jobs and aiding the unemployed. The Works Progress Administration was the largest New Deal relief program that, among many areas, focused on the arts, and many of the works in this exhibition were created during that time.
