Landscapes and Cityscapes of the WPA
This exhibit explores the representations of rural and urban environments during the 1930s. It draws attention to questions of social mobility and the growing presence of industrialization. In these works, cityscapes depict harsh working conditions as well as emerging communities, whereas rural landscapes offer an apparently serene escape from competitive labor and polluted living spaces. Rural life is depicted as fulfilling; urban life appears challenging and at times lonely. Even if reality did not always reflect those contrasting conditions, New Deal artists often favored the dichotomy, and so this exhibit also invites reflection on the ideas of rural and urban.
A century before Federal Art Project painters, the Hudson River School had seen in New York landscapes--and later, those of the American West--a beauty and spirituality that contrasted with rapacious industrial centers. This exhibit utilizes several aesthetic dichotomies to show how intimately art shaped American visions of the landscape: futurity and pastness; confinement and expanse; collectivity and individualism; contact zones as development or destruction. Even light, color, and tone carried specific associations.
Viewed together, these paintings and prints externalize a thematic contrast that reveal what their makers might have been feeling. Industrialization brought employment, efficiency, and economic development; it also caused pollution, overproduction, and deep social inequities. As urbanization resulted in spectacular American cities, so too did it create congestion and waste. The contrasting representation of a glorified countryside and sometimes bleak urban environments offers a glimpse into the social imagination of the New Deal artists and their audiences.
Credits: Keira Killelea, Molly Murty, Angelea Nicaj, Lucas Pastwik, Sam Scamardo, Nadia Taylor