WPA Murals: New Deal Art for the People (1935-1943)

In 1937, an Armenian-born painter named Arshile Gorky was hired by the federal government to paint murals at Newark Airport. The murals, titled Aviation: Evolution of Forms under Aerodynamic Limitations, showed stylized maps, aeronautical instruments, and abstract forms related to flight. They were not the kind of thing most Americans expected to see on a government building. They were modernist, abstract, and strange. They were also paid for by the Works Progress Administration, the same agency that was building roads, bridges, and schools across the country. The WPA did not just hire construction workers. It hired artists, and it put them to work painting murals on the walls of post offices, schools, hospitals, libraries, and airports from coast to coast.

WPA murals are public murals created under the Federal Art Project (FAP) of the Works Progress Administration between 1935 and 1943. The FAP was one of five programs under Federal Project Number One, a New Deal initiative that employed artists, writers, musicians, and theater professionals during the Great Depression. Under the direction of Holger Cahill, the FAP produced over 2,500 murals, 18,000 sculptures, 108,000 easel paintings, and thousands of prints, posters, and craft works. The murals were installed in public buildings across all 48 states, making art accessible to Americans who had never set foot in a museum.

This entry covers what WPA murals are, how the program worked, which artists participated, and what remains of this unprecedented experiment in public art.

What Were the WPA Murals?

The WPA murals were public artworks commissioned and funded by the US federal government as part of unemployment relief during the Great Depression. The Federal Art Project, established in August 1935 under the WPA, hired unemployed painters, sculptors, and graphic artists and assigned them to create art for public buildings. The murals were painted on the walls of post offices, schools, hospitals, libraries, courthouses, prisons, airports, and housing projects. They were not intended for galleries or private collectors. They were intended for the public.

The program was directed by Holger Cahill, an Icelandic-born writer and curator who had organized exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and was an expert in American folk art. Cahill believed that art had become the province of a moneyed urban elite and that the federal government should expand access to both making and experiencing art. He saw the FAP as an exercise in cultural democracy. Harry Hopkins, the WPA's director, put it more bluntly: artists "need to eat, too."

The FAP was a relief program, which meant that 90 percent of the artists employed (later reduced to 75 percent) had to come from the relief rolls. They were paid a weekly wage, roughly $23 to $42 per week depending on the region. The government provided materials, studio space, and administrative support. The art was allocated to tax-supported institutions at no cost. Read more at Living New Deal.

Historical Context and Origins

The WPA murals did not emerge from nothing. They were the culmination of several earlier federal art programs. The first was the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), launched in December 1933 under the Treasury Department and directed by Edward Bruce. The PWAP hired 3,700 artists in just five months and produced over 15,000 works, including several hundred murals. It was a pilot program, and it proved that the government could employ artists at scale.

When PWAP funding expired in 1934, Bruce negotiated a successor: the Treasury Section of Painting and Sculpture, which ran from 1934 to 1943. The Section was not a relief program. It sponsored competitions and awarded commissions to selected artists. Over 1,000 post office murals were commissioned by the Treasury Section, many of which are still in place today. The Section expected artists to paint with the public in mind and to spend time in the community researching local themes.

The Federal Art Project was different from the Section in both scale and philosophy. The Section commissioned art through competitive processes and prioritized quality. The FAP was a relief program that prioritized employment. Cahill's goal was mass participation: he wanted to hire as many artists as possible and put art in as many public spaces as possible. The result was a body of work that ranges from masterful to mediocre, from ambitious to formulaic, but that collectively represents the largest public art program in American history.

Key Artists and Murals

Ben Shahn (1898-1969)

Shahn painted Resources of America (1939) at the Bronx Central Annex Post Office, a mural that depicted American workers and industrial resources. Shahn was already known for his Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti series and brought the same political conviction to his WPA work. His mural style combined precise drawing with simplified, almost cartoon-like figures, giving his work a directness that made political art feel accessible rather than preachy.

Philip Guston (1913-1980)

Before he became famous for his late figurative paintings, Guston worked for the WPA. He painted Early Mail Service and the Construction of the Railroad for the post office in Commerce, Georgia, a mural depicting mail delivery and railroad construction in the 19th century. Guston later said that his WPA years taught him how to paint on a large scale and how to work with a community audience in mind.

Stuart Davis (1892-1964)

Davis painted Swing Landscape (1938), a mural intended for the Williamsburg Housing Project in Brooklyn. The mural is a burst of hot, syncopated colors and abstract forms inspired by jazz and American signage. It is one of the most abstract works produced under the FAP and a demonstration that the program did not require artists to work in a realistic style.

Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000)

Lawrence was employed by the WPA easel division in Harlem, where he painted the Migration Series (1940-1941), 60 small tempera panels telling the story of the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North. The series was not a mural, but it was created under WPA auspices and exhibited at the Downtown Gallery in 1941, making Lawrence the first Black artist represented by a major New York gallery.

Arshile Gorky (1904-1948)

Gorky's Newark Airport murals (1937) were among the most abstract works produced under the FAP. They were also among the most fragile. The murals were removed from the airport in the 1950s during renovations and were not rediscovered until the 1970s, by which point several had been damaged or lost. The surviving panels are now in the collection of the Newark Museum.

Subjects and Style

The government did not officially dictate a style for WPA murals, but it encouraged artists to paint with the public in mind. Most WPA murals were realistic in style and reflected the influence of American Scene painting, which depicted regional landscapes, local customs, and ordinary working people. Common subjects included local history, industry, agriculture, the postal service, and American heroes like Abraham Lincoln, Daniel Boone, and Jane Addams.

The Treasury Section, which commissioned post office murals, required artists to spend time in the community and solicit suggestions for themes from local residents. This produced murals that reflected local identity: a fishing scene in a coastal town, a mining scene in a mountain community, a harvest scene in a farming region. The process was democratic in intention, though it also produced formulaic results. As Art in America noted, much of the Section's output was "flavorless" and "formulaic," diluted by the lengthy approval process. But the best works transcended the constraints. Read more at ArtNews.

Legacy and Preservation

The Federal Art Project ended in 1943, when the WPA was dissolved and the country's economic priorities shifted to World War II. Many WPA murals were lost over the following decades as buildings were renovated or demolished. The US General Services Administration (GSA) has been working since 2001 to locate, recover, and inventory surviving New Deal artworks. Over 1,000 post offices nationwide still have Section murals installed above the postmaster's door.

The WPA murals represent the only time the US government treated art as a public resource at scale. The program employed artists who would become central to American art: Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Lee Krasner, Louise Nevelson, and Isamu Noguchi all worked for the WPA before they were famous. The murals they made are not all great art. But they are a record of a moment when the government believed that art was essential to democracy, and that artists deserved to eat as much as anyone else.

See WPA Murals in Person

Surviving WPA murals are still visible in post offices, schools, and government buildings across the United States. The Living New Deal project maintains a searchable map of New Deal public art sites at livingnewdeal.org. Major museum collections with WPA works include the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Newark Museum, which holds Gorky's recovered airport murals.

Next, read our entries on Social Realism and Mexican Muralism, or explore our post on photography as fine art to see how New Deal photographers like Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans documented the same era.