The WPA & the Golden Age · See America / The Parks
The national parks preserve wild life
J. Hirt · Works Progress Administration / National Park Service, 1936
What it is
A WPA silkscreen poster designed by J. Hirt for the Works Progress Administration and the National Park Service, dated by the Library of Congress to a range between 1936 and 1939. Two bighorn sheep fill the image under the line: The national parks preserve wild life.
Why it matters
This is federal make-work art doing federal argument: the WPA put unemployed designers on payroll and set them to sell the public on its own institutions, and here the pitch is conservation. The sheep are not scenery but the case itself, animals standing in for the parks' promise of protection. It belongs to the New Deal moment when a poster on a wall was how a government spoke to a citizen.
What to notice
The colour is flat, saturated, and hand-pulled, laid down in solid screened areas rather than blended, the printing tell that marks it as silkscreen.
Protection made into a picture you could pin to a wall.
Provenance
- School
- WPA — Federal Art Project (United States)
- Designer
- J. Hirt
- Format
- Travel poster
- Poster published
- Works Progress Administration / National Park Service, 1936
- Source
- Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division · LCCN 98518597; digital ID cph.3f05639
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
