The WPA & the Golden Age · Reading & the Stage
The WPA Federal Dance Theatre presents "The eternal prodigal"
Work Projects Administration, Federal Theatre Project, 1938
What it is
A silkscreen theatre poster, color on board, advertising the WPA Federal Dance Theatre production of "The Eternal Prodigal." The designer's name never made it onto the sheet; the Library of Congress dates it only to the Federal Theatre Project's run, sometime between 1936 and 1941.
Why it matters
This is government-funded stagecraft: the Federal Theatre Project, part of the New Deal's Works Progress Administration, put unemployed artists to work and cheap tickets in front of Depression-era audiences. Posters like this one came out of the WPA's own silkscreen shops, which is why the maker goes unnamed and the method is a workhorse rather than a flourish. It belongs to a brief window when a poster for a dance program was also a small piece of federal relief policy.
What to notice
Look at how the design lives on big unbroken planes of opaque colour rather than any halftone shading, the tell of ink squeegeed through a stencilled screen one pass at a time.
Relief work you could buy a ticket to.
Provenance
- School
- WPA — Federal Art Project (United States)
- Format
- Theater poster
- Poster published
- Work Projects Administration, Federal Theatre Project, 1938
- Source
- Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division · LCCN 98513551
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
