8 Famous Artists Who Benefited From the New Deal

One crucial part of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was the Works Progress Administration (WPA), an organization that created jobs for more than 8.5 million Americans during and after the Great Depression. The WPA is often associated with infrastructure endeavors, from roads and bridges to parks. But it also employed artists across a number of different programs, the largest being the Federal Art Project.

The project, launched in 1935, had separate divisions for mural painters, easel painters, sculptors, graphic artists, and more. It also enlisted people to teach art classes and run community art centers. Though the project did produce plenty of masterpieces, national director Holger Cahill emphasized that its purpose wasn’t to do so. “The organization of the Project has proceeded on the principle that it is not the solitary genius but a sound general movement which maintains art as a vital, functioning part of any cultural scheme,” he said. “Art is not a matter of rare, occasional masterpieces.”

The Federal Art Project ensured steady wages for thousands of artists and generated hundreds of thousands of artworks, many for display in public buildings. Some of the 20th century’s most celebrated artists were once on the payroll—here are eight names that art aficionados should recognize.

1. Willem de Kooning
2. Jackson Pollock
3. Mark Rothko
4. Charles Alston
5. Augusta Savage
6. Berenice Abbott
7. Eitaro Ishigaki
8. Louise Nevelson

Willem de Kooning

In 1935, Dutch abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning quit his day job as a window display designer for a New York City shoe store chain and joined the Federal Art Project. Though the murals he worked on never got painted to scale, the image above shows a small treatment—or study, in artists’ parlance—for one intended for a federal housing project in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Working for the WPA allowed de Kooning to envision a life where painting was his main job, rather than a side gig. “After the project I decided to paint and do odd jobs on the side,” he said in a 1959 interview. “The situation was the same, but I had a different attitude.”

Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock worked in the Federal Art Project’s easel division starting in the mid-1930s. Easel artists produced paintings for government buildings—one painting every four to eight weeks or so, depending on the size. Most of Pollock’s contributions have been lost to history, in large part because Federal Art Project artists were told not to sign their work. But Pollock appreciated the paychecks: In a 1950 interview for The New Yorker, he said he was “grateful to the WPA, for keeping me alive during the thirties” [PDF].

Mark Rothko

Mark Rothko, yet another now-famous abstract expressionist, began making paintings for government buildings for a more selective WPA program under the Treasury Department: the Treasury Relief Art Project. When it downsized, he was transferred to the Federal Art Project’s easel division. Rothko’s wife, jewelry designer Edith Sachar Carson, once said that Rothko considered the WPA “a Godsend to so many artists who really needed help.”

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Charles Alston

Charles Alston was one of the Harlem Renaissance’s most famous artists. When the Federal Art Project assigned him to make murals for Harlem Hospital in 1935, he became the program’s first-ever Black supervisor. His two works, Modern Medicine and Magic in Medicine, along with other Harlem Hospital murals, were restored and relocated to a new patient pavilion in 2012. Alston is also remembered for his 1970 bust of Martin Luther King Jr., which in 1990 became the first image of a Black American ever displayed in the White House.

Augusta Savage

Sculptor Augusta Savage—the first Black member of the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors—was another key Harlem Renaissance figure involved in the Federal Art Project. In 1937, she founded the program’s Harlem Community Art Center, which offered free and subsidized art classes to students of all ages and backgrounds. Savage later left the center to create a sculpture (Lift Every Voice and Sing, a.k.a.The Harp) for the 1939 New York World’s Fair. When she returned to resume her role as director, the center refused her; it soon lost its federal funding and shuttered during World War II.

Berenice Abbott

In 1935, the Federal Art Project started funding photographer Berenice Abbott’s endeavor to capture New York City’s latest phase of urbanization in all its skyscraper glory. According to the New York State Museum, she was given “a $145 monthly salary, a field assistant, research assistants, a secretary, and a car.” The project, which ended due to budget cuts in 1939, is known as Changing New York. It’s “one of the monumental achievements of 20th-century photography,” in the museum’s words.

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Eitaro Ishigaki

Painter Eitaro Ishigaki was born in Japan and immigrated to the U.S. as a teenager in the early 1900s. His main contributions to the Federal Art Project were Civil War murals for the Harlem Courthouse honoring enslaved people and some of the allies—including radical abolitionist John Brown—who helped them fight for freedom. The murals were removed in 1938 because some people found them offensive. By that point, Ishigaki was no longer working for the project: He had been fired in 1937 due to a newly instituted rule that forbade non-citizens from participating in it. “I have lived in this country for thirty years, but because Orientals cannot become citizens, they have taken our only means of livelihood from us,” he said at the time. “Though we live like other Americans—have been educated here, pay taxes, and have the same stomachs as American citizens—we are not allowed to become naturalized. You can see how unfair the whole thing is.”

Louise Nevelson

Louise Nevelson also immigrated to the U.S. as a kid in the early 1900s—from modern-day Kyiv, Ukraine. She’s now best remembered for her towering, puzzle-like sculptures of salvaged wood. But in the 1930s, before she was famous, she worked as an art teacher as part of the Federal Art Project. Her first gig was a mural painting class at Brooklyn’s Flatbush Boys Club for $24 per week. Over the course of six weeks, her 10 young students painted two of their own murals in the club’s halls. After the course’s conclusion, she went on to teach other classes elsewhere and also produce paintings and sculptures for the Federal Art Project. Nevelson, like Abbott, was forced to stop working for the project due to budget cuts in 1939.