The Public Good

Work With Care — WPA Public Health Poster

A workplace-safety poster, sold with the same confidence as a museum print.

Help Your Neighborhood — WPA Public Health Poster

A municipal-sanitation poster in the same hand as the parks series.

The only safe weapons against cancer are surgery, x-rays (and) radium

A blunt 1938 public-health verdict in silkscreen: surgery, x-rays, radium — and nothing else.

Handle with care

A traffic signal and a steering wheel under three words lifted straight off a shipping crate.

Planned housing fights disease

Magnified microbes crowd the frame while planned housing is offered as the cure.

Unfair to babies

An infant walks a picket line - the labor placard turned into a child-care plea.

Give to the needy

A milk bottle blown up to monument size, selling a vaudeville night to feed the hungry.

Diphtheria strikes unprotected children

A lightning bolt aimed at a child, stopped cold by a flying disc marked TOXOID.

Is your child vaccinated?

One enormous red question mark, and a question no parent could walk past.

Milk - for warmth

Bundled against the cold, a woman raises a glass of milk like a small furnace.

Gonorrhea causes blindness - arthritis, invalidism and misery

A silkscreened knight plants his boot on a coiling serpent, and the disease gets a dragon's face.

The great crippler - syphilis

Three blunt words in a WPA silkscreen that name the disease before you can look away.

Keep your teeth clean

A stylised face, a toothbrush, a tube of paste - WPA graphic design stripped to three shapes.