New Deal Art In North Carolina

As the people and economy of the United States struggled to recover during the Great Depression, 42 towns in North Carolina would benefit directly from the $83 million the federal government allocated for public art as part of the New Deal. The result was some of the state's most memorable murals, sculptures, reliefs, paintings, oils, and frescoes, most of which were installed in post offices and courthouses. This book is the only record of all of the North Carolina public art works under the program. It provides in-depth accounts of the works themselves and the artists who created them. Photographs of all of the buildings that originally received the art, the works themselves, and almost all of the 41 artists are provided. An appendix describes federal art projects, 1933-1943. There are detailed footnotes, an extensive bibliography, and an index.

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As the United States struggled to recover from the Great Depression, 24 towns in Alabama would directly benefit from some of the $83 million allocated by the Federal Government for public art works under the New Deal. In the words of Harold Lloyd Hopkins, administrator of the Federal Emergency Relief Act, “artists had to eat, too,” and these funds aided people who needed employment during this difficult period in American history. This book examines some of the New Deal art—murals, reliefs, sculptures, frescoes and paintings—of Alabama and offers biographical sketches of the artists who created them. An appendix describes federal art programs and projects of the period (1933–1943).

JACK IRBY HAYES, JR., revisits the South Carolina of the 1930s to determine the impact of federal programs on the state's economy, politics, culture, and citizenry. He traces the waxing and waning of support for programs such as Works Progress Administration (WPA), Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), and the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) and concludes that the modernization of South Carolina would have been delayed without their intervention. Suggesting that the New Deal hastened the end of one-party political domination, Hayes proposes that it also initiated a new era of modernized agriculture and banking practices, rural electrical service, labor restrictions, relief programs, and cultural resurgence. Hayes finds that Franklin Delano Roosevelt's initiatives enjoyed widespread support among South Carolinians. He documents the welcoming of agricultural and erosion controls, welfare relief, child labor laws, minimum wage requirements, public construction, state parks, and massive hydroelectric projects. He also credits the New Deal with sparking an intellectual reawakening and a restoration of faith in capitalism, democracy, and progress. But Hayes demonstrates that

This book examines the involvement of African American artists in the New Deal art programs of the 1930s. Emphasizing broader issues informed by the uniqueness of Black experience rather than individual artists’ works, Mary Ann Calo makes the case that the revolutionary vision of these federal art projects is best understood in the context of access to opportunity, mediated by the reality of racial segregation. Focusing primarily on the Federal Art Project (FAP) of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), Calo documents African American artists’ participation in community art centers in Harlem, in St. Louis, and throughout the South. She examines the internal workings of the Harlem Artists’ Guild, the Guild’s activities during the 1930s, and its alliances with other groups, such as the Artists’ Union and the National Negro Congress. Calo also explores African American artists’ representation in the exhibitions sponsored by WPA administrators and the critical reception of their work. In doing so, she elucidates the evolving meanings of the terms race, culture, and community in the interwar era. The book concludes with an essay by Jacqueline Francis on Black artists in the early 1940s, after the end of the FAP program. Presenting essential new archival information and important insights into the experiences of Black New Deal artists, this study expands the factual record and positions the cumulative evidence within the landscape of critical race studies. It will be welcomed by art historians and American studies scholars specializing in early twentieth-century race relations.

In 1935, the United States Congress began employing large numbers of American artists through the Works Progress Administration--fiction writers, photographers, poster artists, dramatists, painters, sculptors, muralists, wood carvers, composers and choreographers, as well as journalists, historians and researchers. Secretary of Commerce and supervisor of the WPA Harry Hopkins hailed it a "renascence of the arts, if we can call it a rebirth when it has no precedent in our history." Women were eminently involved, creating a wide variety of art and craft, interweaving their own stories with those of other women whose lives might not otherwise have received attention. This book surveys the thousands of women artists who worked for the U.S. government, the historical and social worlds they described and the collaborative depiction of womanhood they created at a pivotal moment in American history.

Tara Mitchell Mielnik fills a significant gap in the history of the New Deal South by examining the lives of the men of South Carolina's Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) who from 1933 to 1942 built sixteen state parks, all of which still exist today. Enhanced with revealing interviews with former state CCC members, Mielnik's illustrated account provides a unique exploration into the Great Depression in the Palmetto State and the role that South Carolina's state parks continue to play as architectural legacies of a monumental New Deal program. In 1933, thousands of unemployed young men and World War I veterans were given the opportunity to work when Emergency Conservation Work (ECW), one of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal programs, came to South Carolina. Renamed the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1937, the program was responsible for planting millions of trees in reforestation projects, augmenting firefighting activities, stringing much-needed telephone lines for fire prevention throughout the state, and terracing farmland and other soil conservation projects. The most visible legacies of the CCC in South Carolina are many of the state's national forests, recreational areas, and parks. Prior to the work of the CCC, South Carolina had no state parks, but, from 1933 to 1942, the CCC built sixteen. Mielnik's briskly paced and informative study gives voice to the young men who labored in the South Carolina CCC and honors the legacy of the parks they built and the conservation and public recreation values these sites fostered for modern South Carolina.