The WPA & the Golden Age · See America / The Parks
See America
United States Travel Bureau, 1938
What it is
A color silkscreen travel poster titled "See America," showing an encampment on a lakeshore. It was issued through the United States Travel Bureau and dated by the Library of Congress to between 1936 and 1938, with a September 2, 1938 stamp on the verso.
Why it matters
This is New Deal work: the Federal Art Project put artists on payroll to screen posters that sold Americans on their own country, and the Travel Bureau used them to steer citizens toward the parks and the open interior. No individual designer is named on the source page, only the Work Projects Administration Poster Collection, so the maker is the program itself rather than a signature. It belongs to a moment when a public agency treated a night by a lake as something worth printing.
What to notice
Look at the water, rendered as one unbroken band of flat ink rather than modeled ripples, a silkscreen shorthand that lets a few solid colors carry the whole scene.
The republic, advertising its own quiet places back to the people who owned them.
Provenance
- School
- WPA — Federal Art Project (United States)
- Format
- Travel poster
- Poster published
- United States Travel Bureau, 1938
- Source
- Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division · LCCN 98518516 (digital ID cph.3b48750)
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
