Learn about navigating New Deal archives and creating New Deal art exhibitions


Lily Furedi, "Subway," oil on canvas, 1934
Smithsonian American Art Museum

 

In the first of a series of webinars about how New Deal art history is uncovered and written, three scholars and curators discuss the legacy of the Public Works of Art Project (1933-34), a five-month pilot program that hired 3,749 unemployed artists, produced 15,663 artworks, and led to the creation of even larger artist unemployment relief programs that made the U.S. government the single largest patron of contemporary art in the world during the New Deal era. 
 
Ninety years later, this webinar describes how scholars and curators working on exhibitions in recent years have been navigating New Deal archives and uncovering the hidden stories of the PWAP, introducing new generations of viewers to this important legacy. From a PWAP survey exhibition that traveled nationally in 2009-2010 to this year’s Sargent Johnson and Belle Baranceanu retrospectives in California, scholar-curators Ann Prentice Wagner, John Bowles, and Jennifer Peoples Hernandez share PWAP artist stories, how they came to discover them, and research tips for navigating sources of information about the PWAP for fellow researchers, teachers, and New Deal art enthusiasts. 

Ann Prentice Wagner
Ann Prentice Wagner is Director of the Bradbury Art Museum at Arkansas State University. Previously she curated at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts and the National Portrait Gallery. In 2009, Dr. Wagner worked with George Gurney at the Smithsonian American Art Museum on the exhibition 1934: A New Deal for Artists and the exhibition catalog, which included extensive research on the Public Works of Art Program. Dr. Wagner earned her doctorate at the University of Maryland.

John Bowles
John P. Bowles is associate professor of African American art and a faculty affiliate of the Institute of African American Research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He co-curated the 2024 exhibition Sargent Claude Johnson at the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens—the museum’s first major exhibition focused on the work of a Black artist. He also co-edited and contributed to the accompanying catalog, including a chapter on Johnson’s public artworks for San Francisco’s Aquatic Park Bathhouse. Bowles is the author of “New Negro on the Pacific Rim: Sargent Johnson’s Afro-Asian Sculptures,” a chapter in A Long and Tumultuous Relationship: East-West Interchanges in American Art (Smithsonian Institution Press). He is currently writing a book about Johnson that argues for the artist’s importance as both a West Coast modernist and one of the most innovative artists of the New Negro Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s. In 2022, Bowles curated the exhibition Modern Black Culture: The Art of Aaron Douglas for UNC’s Ackland Art Museum.

Jennifer Hernandez
Jennifer Peoples Hernandez, Ph.D. is the author of Belle Baranceanu: Life, Art, and the New Deal Renaissance (Lexington Books, 2023) the first biography on the artist and a history of work relief and the federal government art projects in San Diego. Dr. Hernandez is also the curator of San Diego’s New Deal Renaissance: An Artist’s Experience on view at the San Diego History Center until September of 2024. She also curated Belle Baranceanu: The La Jolla Murals for the La Jolla Historical Society in 2017. Her work has also been featured in the American Art Review. In addition to writing and curating, she is an Adjunct Professor of History at San Diego Mesa College.

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