The Visual Culture of 1930s: Race, Gender, and the Laboring Body

The 1930s mark a moment of extraordinary change in the United States. The Great Depression precipitated a rethinking and reordering of the federal government’s response to economic, political, and social institutions. As part of this rethinking, the federal government sponsored an unprecedented number of art projects, creating jobs for thousands of painters, sculptors, photographers, printmakers, architects, filmmakers, writers, and actors. However, the New Deal art projects of President Franklin D. Roosevelt were not the only response to the changing times. The 1930s also saw the rise of leftist political artists and the strikingly conservative art forms of the so-called “Regionalist” painters. In this seminar, we will consider the federal art projects of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, social realism (broadly conceived), and the world’s fairs of the period—sometimes called the “Century-of-Progress” expositions.