The Federal Art Project (FAP), which provided work for unemployed artists, was part of a revised effort by the New Deal in 1935 to provide work relief for the unemployed. Under the provisions of the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of April 1935, President Franklin D. ROOSEVELT in May created the Works Progress Administration (WPA), with Harry Hopkins as its administrator. Hopkins decided that part of the WPA’s funds should be used to create federal programs to employ jobless artists
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And writers. The separate programs of the Federal Theatre Project, Federal Writers’ Project, Federal Music Project, and Federal Art Project were collectively referred to as Federal One. Ultimately, some $40 million went to FAP, which helped an estimated 9,000 artists.
Hopkins appointed Holger Cahill as director of the FAP Cahill’s professional credentials were not as an artist but rather as a museum curator, art buyer, and prolific writer on American art. Preserving the skills of America’s artists at all levels of proficiency and providing a source of income to impoverished artists were only part of the program’s objectives. Cahill also desired that FAP artists feel a sense of participation in American life and that art be integrated into the lives of the American people by means of increased exposure to the arts.
Achieving such goals proved difficult despite the genuine concern of those involved in the FAP At its peak in 1936, the FAP employed more than 5,000 artists nationwide, but spreading the program beyond the urban centers in which artists typically were concentrated proved a challenge. In November 1936, New York City and Chicago accounted for roughly half of all FAP employment. The most common operation of the FAP outside of urban areas involved community art centers, more than 100 of which were set up in 38 different states by 1940 in an attempt to achieve Cahill’s dream of an art-conscious America. Inexpensive to operate and usually run by a small staff, the art centers provided classes for children and adults as well as exhibitions open to the entire neighborhood.
Most of the artists employed by the FAP were involved in the production of artistic works. FAP workers used many different media types. An estimated 2,500 murals, 18,000 sculptures, 108,000 paintings, 200,000 prints of 11,000 designs, and 2,000,000 silkscreen posters of 35,000 designs were produced throughout the life of the project. Regionalism and social consciousness were common themes in the art produced, which was often influenced by Mexican muralists as well as by labor rights organizations. The FAP’s Index of American Design, an ambitious attempt to compile a pictorial survey of American art, involved research rather than original art. Traveling exhibitions of American art work reproduced as part of the index and exhibitions of FAP production pieces had attendance figures in the millions, including presentations at the World’s Fairs in San Francisco and New York in 1939 and 1940. FAP murals and sculptures appeared in public buildings throughout the country.
Unlike the strong political criticism faced by the Federal Theatre Project, and, to a lesser degree, the Federal Writers’ Project, criticism of the FAP focused on the skill level of the artists employed. Although the FAP nurtured such important artists as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, much of the original FAP art was of indifferent
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Poster for a Federal Art Project exhibition of work by WPA Federal Art Project artists at the Albany Institute of History and
Art (Library of Congress) quality and was disdained by the professional and academic art communities.
By the beginning of World War II, federal funding for the Federal One programs was eliminated, and control of the projects was transferred from Washington, D. C., to state administrations. With the transfer of control to state governments, community centers disappeared due to lack of funds, and the FAP dissolved in the face of wartime priorities and economic recovery. Cahill and his colleagues had failed to convince Congress that federal support of the arts was a legitimate function of government. During its lifetime, however, the FAP not only provided employment to artists during the Great Depression but apparently also contributed to an increase in public awareness of the arts.
See also art and architecture.
Further reading: William F. McDonald, Federal Relief Administration and the Arts: The Origins and Administrative History of the Arts Projects of the Works Project Administration (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1969); Richard D. McKinzie, The New Deal for Artists (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1973).
—Courtney D. Mattingly
World History
