In 2014, when the Museum of Wisconsin Art mounted an exhibition of items created by the Milwaukee Handicraft Project, furniture from it was still being used at the Milwaukee Public Library. They produced toys, dolls, theatre costumes, quilts, rugs, draperies, wall hangings, and furniture that were purchased by schools, hospitals, : 164 and municipal organizations for the cost of materials only. "In that year," he said, "53 percent of Milwaukee's property taxes went unpaid because people just could not afford to make the tax payments." Workers were taught bookbinding, block printing, and design, which they used to create handmade art books and children's books.
Historian John Gurda observed that the city's unemployment hovered at 40% in 1933. : 164 The project came to employ about 5,000 unskilled workers, many of them women and the long-term unemployed. One particular success was the Milwaukee Handicraft Project, which started in 1935 as an experiment that employed 900 people who were classified as unemployable due to their age or disability. As a result, the Federal Art Project supported such iconic artists as Jackson Pollock before their work could earn them income. Abstraction had not yet gained favor in the 1930s and 1940s, so was virtually unsalable. The WPA program made no distinction between representational and nonrepresentational art. Three comparable but distinctly separate New Deal art projects were administered by the United States Department of the Treasury: the Public Works of Art Project (1933–1934), the Section of Painting and Sculpture (1934–1943), and the Treasury Relief Art Project (1935–1938). The primary output of the art-research group was the Index of American Design, a mammoth and comprehensive study of American material culture.Īs many as 10,000 artists were commissioned to produce work for the WPA Federal Art Project, the largest of the New Deal art projects. The work was divided into art production, art instruction, and art research. Artists were paid $23.60 a week tax-supported institutions such as schools, hospitals, and public buildings paid only for materials. The Federal Art Project's primary goals were to employ out-of-work artists and to provide art for nonfederal municipal buildings and public spaces. The project created more than 200,000 separate works, some of them remaining among the most significant pieces of public art in the country.
The Federal Art Project operated community art centers throughout the country where craft workers and artists worked, exhibited, and educated others. It was created as a relief measure to employ artists and artisans to create murals, easel paintings, sculpture, graphic art, posters, photographs, Index of American Design documentation, museum and theatre scenic design, and arts and crafts. Funded under the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935, it operated from August 29, 1935, until June 30, 1943. The Federal Art Project was the visual arts arm of Federal Project Number One, a program of the Works Progress Administration, which was intended to provide employment for struggling artists during the Great Depression. 1935), a wall hanging created by Florence Kawa for the Milwaukee Handicraft Project, was presented to Eleanor Roosevelt : 164
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