On your wall
The WPA & the Golden Age · See America / Cities & States
Information - Brookfield Zoo
Works Progress Administration, 1938
What it is
A color silkscreen on board, printed for Chicago's Brookfield Zoo and dated by the Library of Congress to 1936-1938, with an August 15, 1938 stamp on the verso. The designer is unattributed, one of the anonymous hands in the WPA's Federal Art Project poster shops.
Why it matters
This is New Deal work: the Works Progress Administration paid out-of-work artists to make the everyday signage a public institution needed, and this piece guided visitors through Brookfield Zoo. It belongs to the moment when American design absorbed European modernism and put it to plain civic use - a directional 'Information' sign built with the same clean geometry a museum poster would use.
What to notice
Look at how the hippos sit inside the outline of Africa so that animal and continent collapse into a single silhouette - one shape doing two jobs.
Geography as graphic shorthand: point the way, name the place, in one clean stroke.
Provenance
- School
- WPA — Federal Art Project (United States)
- Format
- Travel poster
- Poster published
- Works Progress Administration, 1938
- Source
- Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division · LCCN96501239 (cph.3g04165)
Live trademark
Brookfield Zoo — sold here as history, never adopted into this house’s own branding.
Rights: CLEAR. Public domain — U.S. government program work (WPA Federal Art Project), any year. Gated by the poster’s own publication year. Cleared by registry on 2026-07-18.
Format
The full-resolution, color-managed file — restored honestly, yours to print and keep.
Sized to protect print quality — this scan supports sizes up to 18x24" cleanly.
Size
$29.00
