%0 Manuscript %G English %T Work Projects Administration posters collection 1933-1941, undated %U http://www2.hsp.org/collections/manuscripts/w/WPApostersV99.html %X The Works Progress Administration (WPA) was created in 1935 and renamed the Work Projects Administration in 1939. Part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, it was a federal agency to provide work to unemployed people. The Federal Art Project (FAP) was formed as a part of the WPA in 1935. The primary goals of FAP were to promote American art and artists; increase art education, especially for children; and research the history of American art and design. FAP subsidiaries were eventually formed in each state; in Pennsylvania the program was called the Pennsylvania Art Project (PAP). It employed artists such as Charles Reed Gardner (1901-1974), Dox Thrash (1892-1965), and Michael J. Gallagher (1898-1965), who created numerous works for the war effort; public buildings, displays, and exhibitions; and for the general support of American art and graphic design. At the beginning of the project, posters were created by hand. By the project’s final years, most posters were being mass produced through the use of silk screening processes. The Work Projects Administration posters collection consists of over five hundred examples of artworks produced primarily by PAP artists during the early 1940s, including photographs, prints, costume plates, drawings, and watercolors. The styles and subjects of the artworks are quite diverse and range from watercolors depicting laborers and landscapes, to woodblock prints inviting visitors to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Philadelphia Zoo, to costume plates showing the daily wear of Romanian peasants. The collection also includes textiles and numerous photographs from theatre performances.