The Works Progress Administration was an ambitious plan under the New Deal in the 1930s to jump-start the U.S. economy after the Depression. At a time when over 10 million Americans were unemployed, this plan helped employ 3 million people. One aspect of this plan included the WPA’s Federal Art Project, which implemented several arts, literacy, media and drama projects throughout thousands of communities across the U.S. The Federal Art Project funded more than 2,500 murals, 18,000 sculptures and 100,000 paintings.
However the funding for these projects came with a caveat: any art depicting Communist ideology was censored. One famous example was in 1933, when one of Diego Rivera’s murals in the Rockefeller Center in New York City was destroyed because Rivera refused to remove an image of Lenin from it.
During this lecture you will learn more about the Federal Art Project and how it challenged and assisted U.S. – Soviet relations at the time. The presenter will be Angelina Lucento, of Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois, who has spent the past year in Moscow on the prestigious Fulbright Program to continue her research on this project. She recently gave a similar presentation at our American Corner in Perm, which received rave reviews.
Please join us at 6p.m. on Friday, March 11