A Living for Us All: Artists and the WPA

Curated by Shana Lopes and Emilia Mickevicius, with our colleagues Maria Castro and Rachel Jans, both of SFMOMA's Painting and Sculpture department

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 03/26/2022 - 07/24/2022

In times of economic crisis, support for artists is often precarious. During the Great Depression, the United States government provided vital aid to thousands of artists, public art projects, and education initiatives through the Works Projects Administration (WPA), also known as the Works Progress Administration. When the program concluded in 1943, artworks were distributed to museums across the country, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Drawn primarily from these holdings, this exhibition highlights the astonishing scope of the work produced under the WPA and its vital role in nurturing art communities across the United States. The WPA sponsored artists working across painting, watercolor, tapestry, photography, and printmaking--an especially critical and prolific medium. Artists with different levels of experience worked side-by-side in printmaking workshops in thirty-five cities around the country and received a steady salary for their work. In addition to fostering collaboration, printmaking was economical and prints were easily disseminated, matching the democratic spirit of the project. WPA artists embraced a variety of approaches to examine their communities and circumstances. Some employed social realist styles and focused on themes of labor and daily life, while others turned to abstraction or surrealism. All engaged in aesthetic experimentation and formal innovation made possible by the program's support. Advancing the radical idea that art is a public resource, the WPA offered a new model for the artist's role in society and profoundly energized American art production at midcentury.