WPA Posters in an Aesthetic, Social, and Political Context

WPA Posters in an Aesthetic, Social, and Political Context PDF Author: Cory Pillen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351004204
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 190

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book examines posters produced by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a federal relief program designed to create jobs in the United States during the Great Depression. Cory Pillen focuses on several issues addressed repeatedly in the roughly 2,200 extant WPA posters created between 1935 and 1943: recreation and leisure, conservation, health and disease, and public housing. As the book shows, the posters promote specific forms of knowledge and literacy as solutions to contemporary social concerns. The varied issues these works engage and the ideals they endorse, however, would have resonated in complex ways with the posters’ diverse viewing public, working both for and against the rhetoric of consensus employed by New Deal agencies in defining and managing the relationship between self and society in modern America. This book will be of interest to scholars in design history, art history, and American studies.

Posters for the People

Posters for the People PDF Author: Ennis Carter
Publisher: Quirk Books
ISBN: 1594749981
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 227

Get Book Here

Book Description
This lavishly illustrated volume amasses nearly 500 of the best and most striking posters designed by artists working in the 1930s and early 1940s for the government-sponsored Works Progress Administration, or WPA. Posters for the People presents these works for what they truly are: highly accomplished and powerful examples of American art. All are iconic and eye-catching, some are humorous and educational, and many combine modern art trends with commercial techniques of advertising. More than 100 posters have never been published or catalogued in federal records; they are included here to ensure their place in the history of American art and graphic design. The story of these posters is a fascinating journey, capturing the complex objectives of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal reform program. Through their distinct imagery and clear and simple messages, the WPA posters provide a snapshot of an important era when the U.S. government employed hundreds of artists to create millions of posters promoting positive social ideals and programs and a uniquely American way of life. The resulting artworks now form a significant historical record. More than a mere conveyor of government information, they stand as timeless images of beauty and artistic accomplishment.

WPA Posters in an Aesthetic, Social, and Political Context

WPA Posters in an Aesthetic, Social, and Political Context PDF Author: Cory Pillen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351004204
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 190

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book examines posters produced by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a federal relief program designed to create jobs in the United States during the Great Depression. Cory Pillen focuses on several issues addressed repeatedly in the roughly 2,200 extant WPA posters created between 1935 and 1943: recreation and leisure, conservation, health and disease, and public housing. As the book shows, the posters promote specific forms of knowledge and literacy as solutions to contemporary social concerns. The varied issues these works engage and the ideals they endorse, however, would have resonated in complex ways with the posters’ diverse viewing public, working both for and against the rhetoric of consensus employed by New Deal agencies in defining and managing the relationship between self and society in modern America. This book will be of interest to scholars in design history, art history, and American studies.

Posters of the WPA

Posters of the WPA PDF Author: Christopher DeNoon
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN:
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 180

Get Book Here

Book Description
These posters were designed for other federal agencies, and as travel posters, education and civic activity posters, health and safety posters, and propaganda posters for World War II.

60 Great WPA Posters

60 Great WPA Posters PDF Author: Rochelle Kronzek
Publisher: Dover Publications
ISBN: 9780486990750
Category : Cartells
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
These vivid WPA poster images, dating from 1935 to 1943, promote public health, travel, and civic activities. Featured artists include Erik Hans Krause, Richard Halls, Jerome Henry Roth, Robert M. Jones, and Katherine Milhous. Reflecting an often-overlooked historical era in socially revolutionary design, the graphics can be printed out at poster size and played as a slideshow on a computer or TV.

National Parks

National Parks PDF Author: Doug Leen
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781619836549
Category : National parks and reserves
Languages : en
Pages : 96

Get Book Here

Book Description


Posters

Posters PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Federal aid to the arts
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Work Projects Administration (WPA) Poster Collection consists of 907 posters produced from 1936 to 1943 by various branches of the WPA. Of the 2,000 WPA posters known to exist, the Library of Congress's collection of more than 900 is the largest. The posters were designed to publicize exhibits, community activities, theatrical productions, and health and educational programs in seventeen states and the District of Columbia, with the strongest representation from California, Illinois, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. The results of one of the first U.S. Government programs to support the arts, the posters were added to the Library's holdings in the 1940s.

Posters for Peace

Posters for Peace PDF Author: Thomas W. Benson
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271067357
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Get Book Here

Book Description
By the spring of 1970, Americans were frustrated by continuing war in Vietnam and turmoil in the inner cities. Students on American college campuses opposed the war in growing numbers and joined with other citizens in ever-larger public demonstrations against the war. Some politicians—including Ronald Reagan, Spiro Agnew, and Richard Nixon—exploited the situation to cultivate anger against students. At the University of California at Berkeley, student leaders devoted themselves, along with many sympathetic faculty, to studying the war and working for peace. A group of art students designed, produced, and freely distributed thousands of antiwar posters. Posters for Peace tells the story of those posters, bringing to life their rhetorical iconography and restoring them to their place in the history of poster art and political street art. The posters are vivid, simple, direct, ironic, and often graphically beautiful. Thomas Benson shows that the student posters from Berkeley appealed to core patriotic values and to the legitimacy of democratic deliberation in a democracy—even in a time of war.

WPA Posters

WPA Posters PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
This dissertation focuses on posters produced by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a federal relief program designed to create jobs in the United States during the Great Depression. Between 1935 and 1943, the WPA established poster divisions in more than seventeen states and printed over two million posters from thirty-five thousand designs. These posters, which were commissioned by government agencies to promote various social programs and services, engaged some of the most pressing concerns of Americans during the New Deal. My project is organized thematically and concentrates on several issues addressed repeatedly in the roughly 2200 extant WPA posters: recreation and leisure, conservation, health and disease, and public housing. As I argue, these posters promote knowledge and social literacy as solutions to these and other social concerns. Moreover, they were sites of negotiation in which knowledge and literacy were regularly re-envisioned, both formally and conceptually, in the process of encouraging social reform. As a result, the posters legitimized various forms of knowledge and ways of knowing in translating the government's complex political and social goals into simple, legible forms that would capture the viewer's attention and mobilize Americans. They also engaged multiple and occasionally competing discourses - social, economic, political, and artistic. This approach positioned knowledge and social literacy at the center of the government's efforts to define and manage the relationship between self and society in modern America. It also promoted physical and social ideals that would have resonated in complex ways with the posters' diverse viewing public, working both for and against the rhetoric of consensus employed by New Deal agencies.

Ranger of the Lost Art

Ranger of the Lost Art PDF Author: Doug Leen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : National parks and reserves
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
Between 1938 and 1941, the National Park Service commissioned WPA artists to create a set of posters for the growing National Park System. These were not just ordinary posters but handcrafted prints using the silk screen method. The onset of WWII derailed the project, with only fourteen parks receiving their prints. After the war ended, these posters disappeared into the dustbin of history. In 1971, the author of this book, then a seasonal ranger in Grand Teton National Park, discovered one surviving print stashed in a park barn, thus beginning a lifelong search for others in this set. Only 1,400 prints were initially made, and today only forty copies have been found. Two park posters have never been located, although photos of them exist. This book tells the story of the early history, rediscovery, and republication of this rare and unique art. The single surviving poster found in a barn served as the template, along with the chance discovery of thirteen black-and-white photographs in park archives, to laboriously reconstruct this unique set of national park poster art. Once the historical reproductions reached the public, demand grew exponentially, and other parks sought WPA-style posters of their own parks. Today, more than sixty of our national parks now have handmade silk screen prints. The first half of this book focuses on the historic prints, and the remaining half shares how these modern designs were created.

Artists, Advertising, and the Borders of Art

Artists, Advertising, and the Borders of Art PDF Author: Michele H. Bogart
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226063089
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 460

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the first study of its kind, Michele H. Bogart explores in unprecedented detail the world of commercial art, its illustrators, publishers, art directors, photographers, and painters. She maps out the border between art and commerce and expands our picture of artistic culture and practice in the twentieth century with unexpected pairings of Norman Rockwell and Andy Warhol, J.C. Leyendecker and Georgia O'Keeffe, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Pepsi-Cola, the avant garde and the Famous Artists Schools, Inc.