The WPA & the Golden Age
The American Wing
Art for the public, by the public’s artists — and the half-century of American posters that came before it.
1893–1943
The one wing that breaks the 1931 wall twice over. Its spine is the Federal Art Project: FAP posters are public domain as U.S. government program work, any year, and the poster division under Anthony Velonis made silkscreen a fine-art print medium at national scale — parks, public health, the stage, sold to a country that owned them all along (source: the Library of Congress WPA collection, ~900 held, no known restrictions). Around it stands the American Golden Age — the pre-1931 posters that already ran the street before the New Deal: Flagg’s Uncle Sam, the Liberty Bond drives, the world’s-fair and circus sheets, the illustrated-magazine covers, public domain by publication and scanned by the Library of Congress large enough to hang wall-scale.
Why this school is here
WPA — Federal Art Project
United States · 1935–1943
Public domain as U.S. government program work (Federal Art Project) regardless of year — the one lane that ignores the 1931 wall.
The American Golden Age — the Poster before 1931
United States · 1893–1930
American commercial, war, exhibition, and magazine posters published 1930 or earlier — the Great War recruiting sheets, the world’s-fair and circus posters, the illustrated-magazine cover. Clears under the pre-1931 rule, alongside (not inside) the WPA’s government-work lane.
Collections
The Launch Hero
See America / The Parks
The national-parks series — the parks belonged to everyone, so did the art.
1935–1941 · United States
Zoos, Fairs, and the American City
See America / Cities & States
The FAP sold the whole country — states, cities, zoos, and winter play, not only the parks.
1936–1941 · United States
The Poster Before 1931
The American Golden Age
Before the WPA silkscreens, the American poster already ran the street — war, the world’s fair, the circus, the magazine cover.
1893–1930 · United States
Health, Safety, Housing
The Public Good
Public-health, safety, and housing posters from the Federal Art Project.
1936–1941 · United States
Libraries and the Federal Theatre Project
Reading & the Stage
Library posters and the Federal Theatre Project’s own silkscreened announcements.
1936–1939 · United States
In the wing
See America / The Parks
Ranger Naturalist Service, Yellowstone — WPA Federal Art Project, c.1938
A silkscreened invitation to the people’s park.
See America / The Parks
Grand Canyon National Park — WPA Federal Art Project
The canyon rendered in a handful of flat screens.
See America / The Parks
Fort Marion National Monument, St. Augustine — WPA Federal Art Project
The oldest masonry fort in the country, sold in six flat colors.
See America / The Parks
Lassen Volcanic National Park, Ranger Naturalist Service — WPA Federal Art Project
An active volcano, kept as calm as the rest of the series.
See America / The Parks
Zion National Park, Ranger Naturalist Service — WPA Federal Art Project
The canyon walls, closing the series.
The Public Good
Work With Care — WPA Public Health Poster
A workplace-safety poster, sold with the same confidence as a museum print.
The Public Good
Help Your Neighborhood — WPA Public Health Poster
A municipal-sanitation poster in the same hand as the parks series.
Reading & the Stage
Voodoo Macbeth — Federal Theatre Project, 1936
The FTP’s own silkscreened playbill for Orson Welles’s all-Black Harlem Macbeth.
See America / The Parks
See America
Two riders cross a shallow desert stream, silkscreened flat and bold for the WPA's See America.
See America / The Parks
See America
An encampment beside still water, screened in a few flat colors for the Travel Bureau's See America pitch.
See America / The Parks
See America
A waterfall cut into flat silkscreen bands, selling the national parks to Depression-era travelers.
See America / The Parks
Mystery veils the desert - National parks
A 1934 Park Service lithograph that sells the desert on atmosphere, not a single landmark.
See America / The Parks
Save our wild life
Dorothy Waugh's 1935 conservation plea, drawn in the flat poster colour of the New Deal park campaign.
See America / The Parks
The lure of the national parks
Dorothy Waugh, 1934: the national parks sold not as scenery but as a pull you cannot refuse.
See America / The Parks
The national parks preserve wild life
Two bighorn sheep hold the frame in J. Hirt's WPA silkscreen for the national parks.
See America / The Parks
Enjoy - don't destroy
Two children picking flowers, and a three-word scolding that has aged remarkably well.
See America / The Parks
Protect your parks
A 1938 WPA silkscreen pulled on board in Ohio: trees, two words, and no argument.
See America / The Parks
Please keep the park clean
A boy with a butterfly net leans against a tree, and the whole park asks one quiet favor.
See America / The Parks
Up where winter calls to play
J. Rivolta's silkscreen turns a winter slope into an invitation you can read from across the room.
See America / The Parks
Olympic bobsled run, Lake Placid
The Lake Placid bobsled run in flat screened color and pure downhill nerve.
See America / The Parks
Discover Puerto Rico U.S.A.
Frank S. Nicholson sells an island already inside the borders: Discover Puerto Rico, U.S.A.
See America / The Parks
Rural Pennsylvania
Katherine Milhous, signed in pencil, gives Pennsylvania's plain-dress children the soft grain of a lithograph stone.
Reading & the Stage
Haiti, a drama of the black Napoleon, by William Du Bois, Lafayette Theatre
Vera Bock's stylized black Napoleon stares out of a 1938 Lafayette Theatre playbill — silkscreen at its most imperious.
Reading & the Stage
The WPA Federal Dance Theatre presents "The eternal prodigal"
A Federal Dance Theatre bill for "The Eternal Prodigal," squeegeed in flat silkscreen colour on board.
Reading & the Stage
Federal Theatre Marionettes present "A Christmas carol"
A horn-blowing herald in period dress strides down the street to cry the Federal Theatre Marionettes' "A Christmas Carol."
Reading & the Stage
"The chocolate soldier"
A woman and a soldier, silkscreened to sell a Federal Music Project staging of "The Chocolate Soldier" in Pasadena.
Reading & the Stage
W.P.A. Federal Theatre Project's Living Newspaper, sponsored by Newspaper Guild of N.Y., presents "Injunction granted"
A cop hoists a court order aloft in Harry Herzog's 1936 silkscreen for the Living Newspaper's "Injunction Granted."
Reading & the Stage
W.P.A. Federal Theatre Negro Unit in "Noah" a human comedy
Noah rides an animal-packed ark, silkscreened to bill the Federal Theatre's Negro Unit at Harlem's Lafayette.
Reading & the Stage
Federal Music Project presents the comic opera "Die fledermaus" - "The bat" by Johann Strauss
A single spread-winged bat carries the whole poster for the Federal Music Project's "Die Fledermaus."
Reading & the Stage
W.P.A. concerts of unusual music
A grand piano cut to a few flat silkscreen shapes, advertising free WPA concerts of music nobody else was playing.
Reading & the Stage
"Carmen"
A matador in flat silkscreen color, standing in for the whole of Bizet's Seville.
Reading & the Stage
W.P.A. Federal Theatre presents "Native ground" by Virgil Geddes
A plow abandoned in the field, the farmhouse shrunk to the horizon - a whole Dust Bowl decade in one silkscreened bill.
Reading & the Stage
Symphony concerts
A silkscreened notice for Federal Music Project symphony nights at the Theatre of Music, 254 West 54th Street.
Reading & the Stage
WPA in Ohio Federal Music Project presents Verdi's grand opera "Il trovatore"
Verdi's grand opera, staged in Ohio on federal relief money and advertised in hand-pulled silkscreen.
Reading & the Stage
Be kind to books club
Children hoist a sign for the Be Kind to Books Club - WPA reading gospel at its most disarming.
Reading & the Stage
Don't gum up a book
A boy tramps across an open book on gum-sticky hands and feet — WPA library manners at their bluntest.
Reading & the Stage
Rain is bad for a book!
A boy raises his umbrella and sits on the open book, letting the weather do its worst.
Reading & the Stage
October's "bright blue weather"
A boy reads while a bat, a ghost, and a witch crowd in from the margins of October.
Reading & the Stage
Exhibition — oils & watercolors, Federal Art Gallery
A palette and brushes announce oils and watercolors at the Federal Art Gallery — horizontal, silkscreened, unsigned.
Reading & the Stage
Exhibition (Federal Art Project, Greek figure holding print)
A Greek head in profile lifts a print to the light — Milhous selling art with art, cut in wood.
Reading & the Stage
East side, West side exhibition of photographs
A photographer lines up his shot with the New York skyline stacked at his back.
Reading & the Stage
Young and old visit the library on the parkway
A family sets out for the library on the parkway, printed in 1936 as a WPA colour lithograph.
See America / Cities & States
Just One Long Step to Sea Cliff, L.I.
One long stride from the fairgrounds to the Long Island shore, sold in poster-flat colour.
See America / Cities & States
Visit Brookside Zoo free
A leopard prowls the width of a rare landscape-format WPA zoo poster - admission, it insists, is free.
See America / Cities & States
Visit the Brookfield Zoo free Thursday, Saturday, Sunday
A polar bear anchors three free days a week, the schedule set in type beneath him.
See America / Cities & States
Information - Brookfield Zoo
Hippos laid over the silhouette of Africa - a zoo's wayfinding turned into pure graphic shorthand.
See America / Cities & States
Visit the zoo - Philadelphia
A hippopotamus cut in woodblock, its bulk carried by a few carved planes, gouge marks left in the ink.
See America / Cities & States
Visit the zoo (three penguins)
Three penguins in carved black and white, a whole poster built from two colors and a stance.
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The Public Good
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.
The Public Good
Handle with care
A traffic signal and a steering wheel under three words lifted straight off a shipping crate.
The Public Good
Planned housing fights disease
Magnified microbes crowd the frame while planned housing is offered as the cure.
The Public Good
Unfair to babies
An infant walks a picket line - the labor placard turned into a child-care plea.
The Public Good
Give to the needy
A milk bottle blown up to monument size, selling a vaudeville night to feed the hungry.
The Public Good
Diphtheria strikes unprotected children
A lightning bolt aimed at a child, stopped cold by a flying disc marked TOXOID.
The Public Good
Is your child vaccinated?
One enormous red question mark, and a question no parent could walk past.
The Public Good
Milk - for warmth
Bundled against the cold, a woman raises a glass of milk like a small furnace.
The Public Good
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 Public Good
The great crippler - syphilis
Three blunt words in a WPA silkscreen that name the disease before you can look away.
The American Golden Age
I Want You for U.S. Army - Nearest Recruiting Station
Uncle Sam's finger, aimed straight out of the sheet - the most reproduced recruiting image America ever printed.
The American Golden Age
I Want You for the Navy
Christy's standing 'Navy girl' recasts the recruiting summons as glamour rather than command.
The American Golden Age
Gee!! I Wish I Were a Man, I'd Join the Navy
A woman in Navy blues delivers the dare that made the poster famous: be a man and do it.
The American Golden Age
That liberty shall not perish from the earth — Buy liberty bonds, Fourth Liberty Loan
New York harbor in flames and the Statue of Liberty beheaded — the most alarming image American war finance ever printed.
The American Golden Age
Destroy this mad brute — Enlist, U.S. Army
A gorilla in a spiked helmet wades ashore with a bloody club marked 'kultur' — American propaganda at its most unhinged.
The American Golden Age
For Every Fighter a Woman Worker — Care for Her through the YWCA
A woman in blue overalls, dated 1918 — the war-work poster that put the female industrial worker on the wall as an equal.
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The American Golden Age
The Barnum & Bailey Greatest Show on Earth - Chaste, Charming, Weird & Wonderful Supernatural Illusions Created by Roltair, the Magician
A Strobridge chromolithograph selling Roltair's stage phantoms as the circus's most respectable thrill.
The American Golden Age
Harper's, May
Penfield's monthly Harper's placard - flat color, hard outline, and a reader who never looks up.
The American Golden Age
Panama-Pacific International Exhibition, San Francisco - Southern Pacific Railway
A railroad's panoramic sales pitch for the 1915 exposition: 'the greatest, the most beautiful and the most important in history.'
See America / Cities & States
Ephrata
A woman drawn as an angel stands in for the Ephrata Cloister, Pennsylvania's austere eighteenth-century commune.
See America / Cities & States
Pennsylvania
An Amish couple in flat lithographic color, selling Lancaster County to anyone with a train ticket.
See America / Cities & States
Philadelphia - Carpenters' Hall
Carpenters' Hall reduced to a handful of silkscreen flats — brick, sash, cupola, and not one wasted pass.
See America / Cities & States
Visit historic Ephrata, Pennsylvania
Two angels scatter flowers over the Ephrata Cloister — Milhous at her most fraktur.
See America / Cities & States
Philadelphia
Old Swedes' Church in silkscreen flats — Philadelphia's oldest standing church as a travel pitch.
See America / The Parks
Pueblos of the Southwest
Pueblo dwellings, a cactus and a clay pot, stacked into one flat Southwestern plane by Dorothy Waugh.
See America / Cities & States
See America
Two tiny figures dwarfed by a cavern's throat, scale doing all the advertising work.
See America / Cities & States
See America, Welcome to Montana
A lone rider against Montana mountains, the whole range carried on three or four flat colors.
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Reading & the Stage
Federal Theatre (on) Treasure Island "Swing mikado"
A woman dancer in mid-motion advertises the Federal Theatre's swing-band Mikado at the 1939 Treasure Island fair.
See America / Cities & States
Punch & Judy
Two puppet busts, screened flat and loud, summon an audience to Punch & Judy at the Sioux City Art Center.
Reading & the Stage
"The Mikado"
A screened Japanese tea garden fronts a Federal Music Project Mikado at El Centro High School.
Reading & the Stage
Gala puppet circus
One clown's head, screened in flat circus colour, carries an entire Federal Theatre puppet show.
Reading & the Stage
Federal WPA Variety Theatre presents vaudeville
A singer mid-note, flung across a silkscreened poster for a nine-act WPA vaudeville bill.
Reading & the Stage
Federal Theatre Project presents 10 acts all star vaudeville
Ten acts, a chorus line and an orchestra pressed onto one silkscreened sheet for a hall in Salem, Massachusetts.
Reading & the Stage
Illinois symphony orchestra
One outsized musical note carries an entire symphony bill at the Great Northern Theatre.
Reading & the Stage
Hall Johnson's famous negro music-drama "Run, little chillun"
Two singers, two dancers, and a silkscreened call to the Savoy Theatre in San Diego.
Reading & the Stage
Presented by The Federal Dance Theatre "Young tramps"
Two figures walking in the rain, cut in silkscreen for the Federal Dance Theatre's "Young Tramps."
Reading & the Stage
Snow White and the seven dwarfs
Snow White, a prince and all seven dwarfs crowded into one hand-screened WPA sheet.
See America / Cities & States
A trip around the world at story hour time
Two children perched on an open book look down over mountains and trees.
Reading & the Stage
In March read the books you've always meant to read
A windblown woman braces against March, trailing Scott, Dumas, Dickens and Austen.
See America / Cities & States
Story hour
A girl at a woman's knees, an open book between them: story hour, in flat silkscreen colour.
Reading & the Stage
For greater knowledge on more subjects use your library more often
A mortarboard and a pair of spectacles float over the globe - the WPA's pitch that a library card is a passport.
See America / Cities & States
This is an adult world, its problems are up to you!
A globe and a draughtsman's compass, and a slogan that hands the reader the bill for the century.
See America / Cities & States
We are all ignorant on some subjects - what is yours?
The flame of knowledge over an open book, framed in an oval, under a question aimed straight at the passer-by.
See America / Cities & States
The world wants new knowledge - new skills
The earth itself as the client, and retraining as the terms of employment.
See America / Cities & States
Announcing federal adult classes
Federally sponsored classes, a street address on Ontario Street, and no ornament wasted on either.
See America / Cities & States
Free classes for adults - register now
A full curriculum in one breath - social studies, home-making, business, music, Americanization, language, science, arts.
See America / Cities & States
Community Center
A silkscreened inventory of civic life: instruments, tools and sports gear stacked as an invitation.
Reading & the Stage
Curb service - Chicago Public Library
A traffic light stands in for a bookmobile: curb service, 10,000 current books, free.
See America / Cities & States
Poster for the Harlem Community Art Center
Rothstein's 1938 Federal Art Project poster announcing the Harlem Community Art Center.
See America / Cities & States
Visit the Zoo (Two Penguins)
Two penguins, cut in wood and printed flat, invite the whole Depression-era city to the zoo.
See America / Cities & States
Ephrata (Woman as an Angel)
Katherine Milhous turns a Pennsylvania German cloister into a single winged figure in flat lithographic colour.
See America / Cities & States
Lack of funds need not discourage from seeking competent medical care
A Depression-era poster that says the quiet part out loud: being broke is not a reason to stay sick.
See America / Cities & States
Eat these every day
Milk, eggs, bread, meat and vegetables laid out flat and bright - the food pyramid before it was a pyramid.
See America / Cities & States
Cellar ceilings must be fire-retarded
Martin Weitzman puts a couple inside a burning house and lets the building code do the rest.
The Public Good
Keep your teeth clean
A stylised face, a toothbrush, a tube of paste - WPA graphic design stripped to three shapes.