The Federal Art Project (1935–1943)
Public art changes how people feel when they walk past a building, what they think about the place they live, and how they see themselves as part of a community. The effect is not trivial, and during the Great Depression it was a matter of national importance.
Between 1935 and 1943, the United States government took that idea seriously. For ten years, the WPA Federal Art Project employed thousands of artists to create work for public spaces — post offices, courthouses, schools, libraries, community centers. The philosophy driving it wasn’t charity. It was a belief that art is essential to how a society functions, and that everyone, not just the wealthy, deserves access to it.
Holger Cahill, the project’s national director, put it this way: “The organization of the Project has proceeded on the principle that it is not the solitary genius but a sound general movement which maintains art as a vital, functioning part of any cultural scheme. Art is not a matter of rare, occasional masterpieces.”
That belief produced over 3,500 murals that are still on walls today, and sustained an entire generation of American artists.
Inspiration
Art elevates the spaces it inhabits. A post office with a mural on the wall is a different kind of place than a post office without one. It tells the people who walk in that this space was built with care, that someone thought about what it would feel like to be here. The New Deal’s Treasury Section understood this: they set aside one percent of federal building construction costs specifically for art, because they believed public buildings should be worthy of the public they served.
That one-percent model is still used in some states and cities today. It works because it treats art not as decoration but as infrastructure — as essential to a building as the roof.
A Sense of Community
The New Deal art programs brought artists together at a scale that had never been attempted. At Coit Tower in San Francisco, twenty-seven artists worked side by side in a single building, each contributing panels that reflected different perspectives on California life. The WPA established more than 100 community art centers across the country, many in places where art had been almost unknown, where people could see exhibitions, take classes, and work alongside artists.
Augusta Savage ran the Harlem Community Art Center, one of the most important creative spaces in Depression-era New York. Young artists like Jacob Lawrence and Norman Lewis came through her program and went on to reshape American art. The centers weren’t just places to display work — they were places where people made things together, where a neighborhood could develop its own creative identity.
The programs understood something fundamental: art doesn’t just belong on walls. It belongs in the relationships between the people who make it and the communities that live with it.
Dialogue
Art doesn’t need everyone to agree with it. It needs people to look, react, and think. Some of the most important New Deal murals were deliberately provocative, and the conversations they started are still going.
Diego Rivera’s Man at the Crossroads at Rockefeller Center is the most famous case. Rivera included a portrait of Lenin in a government-commissioned mural. The Rockefellers had it chiseled off the wall at midnight. Rivera’s response was to paint a recreation, Man, Controller of the Universe, at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, where it still hangs today. The argument about who controls the content of public art has not been settled since.
At Coit Tower, Victor Arnautoff’s City Life depicted industrial labor, ethnic diversity, and class conflict with a directness the Treasury Section would never have approved. Bernard Zakheim’s The Library showed books and newspapers as instruments of social change. The murals were controversial from the day they were unveiled, and they’ve been protected as historic landmarks ever since.
Public art creates shared reference points. It puts ideas in front of people who didn’t go looking for them, and that generates real conversation about what a society values and where it’s headed.
Dignity
The person mailing a package deserves to stand in a room with a painting on the wall. The person paying a water bill deserves to look at something that was made with skill and intention. Art is not reserved for people who can afford a museum ticket or a gallery opening.
Eleanor Roosevelt put it plainly: “The people as a whole must realize that they have to shoulder greater responsibilities, if we are not going to lose many of the things which have been of great value to us in the past. Everyone will have to give something for the development of science, for the development of art in its branches.”
More than half of the one million people who attended Federal Theatre Project performances each month had never before seen live theater. The community art centers welcomed people who had never set foot in a gallery. The programs didn’t just create art, they created audiences — an invitation extended to millions of Americans to participate in something that had previously been closed off to them.
The Programs
The New Deal art programs weren’t a single effort. They were four overlapping initiatives with different structures and philosophies.
Public Works of Art Project (1933–1934) — The first federal art program. A six-month initiative under the Treasury Department that employed 3,700 artists and proved the concept: you could pay artists through public works.
Treasury Section of Painting and Sculpture (1934–1943) — The merit-based program. Artists competed anonymously for commissions, judged by other artists, funded by a one-percent set-aside from construction budgets. Over its lifespan, roughly 1,400 contracts for over 1,000 murals and 260 sculptures. This produced most of the post office murals that survive today.
Treasury Relief Art Project (1935–1938) — A smaller program using workers already on relief rolls to create art for federal buildings, bridging the Section’s competitive model and the WPA’s broader approach.
WPA Federal Art Project (1935–1943) — The largest and most consequential. At its peak in 1936, over 5,000 artists on payroll; over its full lifespan, probably 10,000. The output: 2,566 murals, over 100,000 easel paintings, 17,700 sculptures, nearly 300,000 fine prints, and 22,000 plates for the Index of American Design documenting American folk art and material culture. Artists were paid $23.60 a week. Total federal investment: about $35 million. Unlike the Treasury Section, the WPA made no distinction between representational and abstract art.
The Murals
Thomas Hart Benton’s America Today — a ten-panel mural cycle painted in 1930–31 for the New School in New York — now has its own room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Eight panels depict life in different regions of the country: the South, the Midwest, the West, and New York. The final panel, Outreaching Hands, shows only hands reaching for bread and other hands holding money — the economic despair of the Depression rendered without a single face. It is one of the most visited works at the Met.
Arshile Gorky, years before he became a leading abstract expressionist, painted a ten-part mural series called Aviation: Evolution of Forms under Aerodynamic Limitations for the Newark Airport Administration Building — among the first modernist murals created under the WPA. During World War II, the airport was converted to a military base and the murals were painted over. In 1973, two surviving panels were discovered beneath fourteen layers of paint. They’re now at the Newark Museum.
The Coit Tower murals in San Francisco remain the most celebrated concentration of New Deal public art — twenty-seven artists working together in a single space, producing everything from gentle California regionalism to pointed political commentary. George Biddle’s Society Freed through Justice murals in the Department of Justice building in Washington showed sweatshops, tenements, and the promise of a more equitable society. Edward Laning’s subway murals in New York depicted working-class New Yorkers in their actual environments with sympathy and without sentimentality.
And roughly 1,200 post office murals survive across the country. The commission process was local: when a new post office was built, artists submitted designs, a jury selected a winner, and the artist was paid in stages. The murals were aspirational by design — the Section explicitly steered artists away from depicting hardship. The bread lines and unemployment that defined the era rarely appear. Instead, the murals showed communities as they wanted to be seen: thriving, working, rooted in place. The official art of the Depression era mostly does not depict the Depression. It depicts possibility.
The Artists
The Federal Art Project supported an entire generation and created a foundation for some of the greatest American artists. Jackson Pollock worked in the WPA’s easel division, making small abstract paintings nothing like the drip works that would later make him famous. Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and Arshile Gorky all did WPA work when few institutions would support abstract experimentation. Philip Guston made social realist murals years before becoming an abstract painter. Ben Shahn and Stuart Davis used the programs to develop the politically engaged, formally inventive work that defined mid-century American art.
Augusta Savage, a Black sculptor from Florida, ran the Harlem Community Art Center — one of the most important spaces for Black artists in Depression-era America. Her students included Norman Lewis, who became a leading abstract expressionist, and the young Jacob Lawrence, who painted his celebrated Migration Series shortly after his time there.
The sculptor Robert Cronbach described what the programs meant for working artists: “For the creative artist, the WPA/FAP was an unequaled opportunity for a serious artist to work as steadily and intensely as possible to advance the quality of his art.”
Creativity needs to be nurtured to grow and survive. What the New Deal understood, and what made it unprecedented, was that nurturing artists is not indulgence — it is investment. The programs gave working artists stability, community, and the freedom to develop. The art that came out of that investment went on to define what American art means to the rest of the world.
The Legacy
Over 3,500 New Deal murals are still on walls in American public buildings. Roughly 1,200 in post offices. Several hundred more in federal buildings, schools, hospitals, and libraries. Thousands of easel paintings sit in museum collections across the country. Benton’s America Today fills a room at the Met. The 22,000 plates of the Index of American Design are archived at the National Gallery of Art.
The programs lasted ten years. The National Endowment for the Arts, established in 1965, has never approached the same scale or ambition. But the evidence of what’s possible when a government commits to public art is everywhere — in the murals still on the walls, in the artists whose careers they made possible, and in the communities that have lived with this work for nearly a century.
The Federal Art Project showed that public art works at scale, that communities value it, and that the investment outlasts everything else. It remains the most compelling proof that art belongs in public life — and an invitation to build on what it started.