The Influence of Progressivism and the Works Progress Administration on Museum Education

ABSTRACT

The Federal Arts Project (WPA-FAP) (1935–1943) of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) was a federally funded program designed through Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal to keep visual artists at work during the Great Depression. Many of these arts programs took place through museums and exhibitions, bringing the visual arts to everyday Americans with public programs and outreach. The continued legacy of these community-driven, education-centered approaches is evident in today's museums through outreach initiatives, studio programs, and responsive community programs that seek to bring visual arts experiences to the public. This article will discuss key WPA-FAP museum programs and policies, and relate these objectives to current practice in museum education.

KEYWORDS:

• Works Progress Administration
• Federal Arts Project
• New Deal
• community art
• teaching artist
• studio art programs

The federal arts project

The Federal Arts Project (WPA-FAP) (1935–1943) of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) was a federally funded program designed through Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal to keep visual artists at work during the Great Depression. Over 5000 artists were employed through this program that brought art to 38 states. Many of these programs incorporated museums and exhibitions, seeking to bring arts experiences into the lives of the American people through public programs and outreach initiatives. The programs of the WPA also crossed racial boundaries as African American artists were hired to create works of art based on their own experiences, and community arts centers gave neighborhoods access to art through studio classes and exposure to living artists.

In this article, we examine the motivations behind the WPA and the role it played in shifting the mission of art museums and art museum education toward reaching culturally and socio-economically diverse American audiences. We will also consider how these philosophies are manifested in contemporary museum education. The legacy of the WPA-era is evident in current museum practices through community-centered approaches, outreach, and studio programs designed to make art accessible to the general public. Like museums of the 1930s, museums today prioritize education, access, and learning through active experiences.

Learning more about WPA programs not only demonstrates how programming in museum education has transformed over time, but it also helps us to understand the successes and challenges of museum staff as they worked to make museums and arts centers integral parts of the communities they served. Through these government-funded programs, we may find similarities to contemporary museum education programming, and we may be inspired by some of the ways that museum staff sought to bring art to wider audiences.

The background of the WPA-FAP

By the 1930s, museums were changing to incorporate community initiatives into their programming. Inspired by German Bauhaus design, museums in America and abroad embraced the open plans and minimalist spaces of modern architecture, creating galleries that were more functional for groups of visitors. With these changes, the role of education gained a more prominent position in the museum, evident in a more visitor-centered approach to exhibition design. Prior to this time, most U.S. art museums provided little written information for visitors; around the 1930s, museums such as the Museum of Modern Art began to include longer labels with art historical and biographical information to help visitors understand the art.¹ The elevated role of museum education is reflected in the publications of the time. T.R. Adams published The Civic Value of Museums in 1939 and stressed the importance of creating opportunities for all citizens to interact with original objects and primary sources.² There were also more studies concentrating on museum audiences.³ For instance, Paul Marshall Rea's 1932 The Museum and the Community, sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation, focused on research between museums and their communities and the effects of the Depression on these relationships. Rea believed that small museums were better equipped to reach their communities than large ones and argued for neighborhood branches of museums instead of expansions to better serve the public.⁴ Directors of the time, including Philip Youtz of the Brooklyn Museum, Theodore Low from the Baltimore Museum of Art, Victor d’Amico at the Museum of Modern Art, and Francis Henry Taylor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, called for more socially relevant and cultural approaches to works of art.⁵ These directors incorporated education into the mission of the museum and put it at the forefront of the institution. By the late 1930s, museum administrators recognized that public museums had a responsibility to educate its public, but how to do that was still being debated.⁶ The role of the education departments during this time, however, became focused more on children as program offerings and staff expanded in these areas.⁷

The work of these directors and educators was built from Progressivism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that sought to improve society through action and emphasized the role of education in creating change for the good.⁸ These ideas were propagated through John Dewey's work on progressive educational theory,⁹ and John Cotton Dana, Director of the Newark Museum, who argued that museums should be accessible to everyone and sites of social reform.¹⁰

Although the work of progressive museum directors and educators, as well as writers and researchers, initiated these developments, funding through the WPA-FAP sustained them through the Great Depression and sparked a growth in public support for the arts.¹¹ It was the economic hardship of the Depression and the desire to see the arts continue that fueled the arts component of the New Deal.¹² Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal programs, government-funded interventions meant to invigorate the economy, were initiated in 1933 at the beginning of his presidency. Among the components of the New Deal was the WPA started in 1935 that created public works projects including the construction of buildings and roads. A smaller component of the WPA was Federal Project Number One (known as Federal One), that incorporated five arts divisions: visual arts in the division of the WPA-FAP, theatre, music, writing, and historical records.

The WPA-FAP had three overall goals. First, it was meant to provide government jobs for artists who might otherwise pursue non-artistic work during the Depression. Second, the program would provide opportunities for artists to work closer to the general population through teaching and creating art. The belief was that artists would gain inspiration from the public, and in turn, a mass audience for the arts would be created in America; the average person would find that the arts were more accessible and more meaningful to him or her. Finally, if the government could recover the arts in addition to the economy during the Depression, these programs would lead to “a nation of cultural consumers” who would sustain the arts after funding from the government ceased and view art not as a luxury, but “a community asset.”¹³ The idea that works of art would no longer be available solely for the wealthy and concentrated in urban areas, but something for everyone, no matter their race, location, or socioeconomic background, was a crucial piece of the WPA-FAP. The concept of “Art for the Millions” spurred on this initiative, as art seemed to have no boundaries and could be brought to everyone. Organizers of the WPA-FAP hoped that this connection between the artist and society would lead to a distinctly American art, another goal of the New Deal.¹⁴ Rather than looking to Europe for inspiration and training, the people behind the WPA programs wanted America to have its own artistic identity.

President Roosevelt appointed Harry Hopkins to direct the WPA as the federal work relief administrator. Hopkins had experience in social work and had started the first state relief program for artists in New York.¹⁵ Hopkins appointed four cultural directors, one for each discipline the WPA would fund through Federal One, two of whom focused on the visual arts. Edward Bruce served as the head of the Treasury Section of the Fine Arts that commissioned visual artists to decorate public buildings, a position he had held since 1934 before the WPA began.¹⁶ Holger Cahill oversaw the remaining visual arts programs. Cahill's background made him uniquely prepared for this position.¹⁷ He was a follower of Dewey and had worked for Dana at the Newark Museum until Dana's death in 1929. While at the Newark Museum, Cahill was the curator of an exhibition on American folk art, and in 1932, as acting director of the Museum of Modern Art, he organized an exhibition that proposed early American folk art had influenced high art and culture.¹⁸

Two administration branches comprised the WPA-FAP. The first focused on employing artists, the artists’ production, and education, and community art centers fell into this category. The second branch included the Index of American Design that researched and recorded decorative arts in America, the Exhibition Department that organized exhibitions in museums, schools, and art centers, and the Information Department which focused on publicity.¹⁹ Cahill worked with a team of field advisors, regional and state art directors, district art directors, and local advisory committees who set policy and maintained guidelines.²⁰ However, part of the success of the WPA-FAP was its flexibility; no project was required by every state, and communities could adapt programming to fit their needs.²¹ This was especially true of the first branch of the WPA-FAP, while the administration of the second branch was located in Washington, DC.²²

WPA-FAP programs

The WPA-FAP was able to bring visual art to 38 states, although 75% of the programs remained in cities. Art education and exhibitions were available at over one hundred community art centers, and exhibitions traveled from major institutions including the Whitney Museum, the Newark Museum of Art, and the Phillips Memorial Gallery.²³ In addition to these exhibitions, community art centers also exhibited works by local artists and children, and the progressive philosophy is reflected in Cahill's 1939 description: “The core of the community art center is active participation, doing and sharing, and not merely passive seeing … The WPA Community Art Centers emphasize learning through doing.”²⁴

As part of these exhibitions, 10- to 15-minute lectures were organized by state and federal officials on a regular basis, often focusing on how visitors could learn from the exhibitions.²⁵ These lecture topics offered a broad range of subjects designed to appeal to a wide audience, including “The Fine Art of Silvercraft,” and “Art for Children.”²⁶ In Chicago, patrons were taught how to analyze works of art.²⁷ Artists were the focus of employment for the WPA-FAP, often marginalizing art educators in these initiatives.²⁸ However, for these centers, it was critical that “art center workers who come in contact with visitors be sufficiently well-trained not only in art, but also in the presentation of art and ideas to the general public.”²⁹

Phillip Fletcher Bell led a robust WPA-FAP program at the Washington, DC Art Center.³⁰ This center included a Children's Art Gallery and around 165 classes held in various locations around the city. In these classes, children were taught to express ideas freely, and art lessons were taught in the form of play. Children were encouraged to use their own experiences as inspiration in their art. This program was racially integrated, but some centers were not, including those in New York, with the idea that this separation would promote cultural heritage.³¹

Community art centers specifically developed for African American communities appeared around the country, including in Jacksonville, Chicago, and Harlem, and for many community members these encounters were their first experiences with the work of African American artists. Artist Vertis Hayes wrote,

One of the problems of the Negro artist is reaching his audience, as it is with all the artists … To the WPA/ WPA-FAP must go the credit for having taken the initiative in bringing art opportunities to a great number of people, for in many communities throughout the country where representative numbers of people indicated cognizance of the need for art training and education by willingness to support such enterprises, art centers have been established.³²

The Harlem Community Art Center gave artists points of interaction with their community and served as a school for emerging artists.³³ In 1939, the director of the Harlem Community Art Center reported to reach over 4000 people a month, and this included children and adults taking studio classes, audiences for extension activities, lectures, and demonstrations, and visitors seeing exhibitions and attending special events.³⁴

Additionally, support was given to existing museums through the WPA. In the Metropolitan Museum of Art's (Met) 1942 bulletin, Francis Henry Taylor describes the assistance of the WPA to the Met as this funding was about to end. Among the listed accomplishments of the museum through this support were artists given jobs to create educational materials such as maps and charts for classroom and gallery lectures, two million visitors who visited neighborhood exhibitions in schools, libraries, and community centers around New York City, the restoration of the entire collection of Greek and Roman casts, and new frames that were given to many works from the museum's collection.³⁵

Some programs were designed as outreach for multiple communities. The Art Caravan program used an army ambulance to create a traveling art exhibition.³⁶ The ambulance was fitted to include folding screens and pedestals to display two- and three-dimensional works of art. The drivers were artists and lecturers, and they displayed the works in rural areas in front of libraries and town squares. In the evening, the driver gave a lecture about art and a ballot box was available for the public to vote on the works they liked best and to offer input on whether or not they would like a community art center or other services of the WPA-FAP. According to Eugene Ludins, one of the facilitators, the program “proved over and over again that the very people who ‘know nothing about art’ are the most easily interested when it is presented to them informally and they are encouraged to express their opinions.”³⁷ Although the returned ballots included positive responses from participants, critics of these rural projects argued that programs like these assumed that the people of these small towns were culturally uneducated and needed the enlightenment of the WPA-FAP.³⁸

Another type of project that existed in at least twenty-four states was a program for WPA artists to create teaching materials for museums and other non-profit learning institutions.³⁹ The program originated in Pennsylvania as the Museum Extension Project, and in this state alone over a million books and objects were created through the program. Learning materials such as puppets, maps, architectural models, dioramas, and posters were developed to teach about the history, culture, and art of Pennsylvania. Although each state's specific goals and objectives varied, the visual aids developed through these projects were used to benefit learning in schools, libraries, and museums.

The ideas of creating a wider accessibility to museum collections also went beyond the scope of the WPA in the 1930s. Museum staff was aware of the need to create programs for children and adults during a time of economic strife. These financial strains also forced museum professionals to pursue support from the government. To get this funding, these institutions had to demonstrate their service to the community.⁴⁰ For instance, the Pennsylvania Museum of Art (today known as the Philadelphia Museum of Art) opened a storefront location in a commercial area of the city during the 1930s, known as the 69th Street Branch.⁴¹ Social workers evaluated the needs of the community, and with their information, a museum was created with evening hours more convenient for working men and exhibitions that changed frequently. This branch was designed to appear casual and accessible to its visitors. Wall text was written to be informative and friendly, and galleries were small and intimate. According to the director of this initiative, Philip Youtz, with private support decreasing during the Depression, museums had to serve the community and prove that they “deserved” public support.⁴²

The 69th Street Branch points to the educational role of the museum through all departments, including curatorial, a discussion that continues today in visitor-centered exhibitions, collaborative approaches to exhibitions, and “edu-curation,” that “plays to individual skill sets, relieving team members of the privilege or burden of functioning as sole authority.”⁴³ In edu-curation, the role of educators is expanded as they become more involved in the planning of exhibitions and curatorial decisions.⁴⁴ These collective practices create a unified vision of exhibitions and programming that allowed visitors to participate and engage with works of art and each other in the galleries of the museum.

The end of the WPA

Government officials considered the WPA programs as a way to offer temporary relief to artists, and this funding was precarious from the start. Marked with criticism, accusations of communism and stricter limitations for the artists, the program battled cuts in funding early on. In 1940, to ward off additional budget cuts, Cahill advised that art projects focus on the needs of the armed forces and in 1943, Roosevelt ordered that all WPA-FAP projects end, leaving many artists without work.⁴⁵

Cahill and supporters considered the program a success through the reported numbers of children and adults, artists and the public participating in the programs, exhibitions, and classes the WPA-FAP offered during these eight years as well as the attitudes of the people they served. As Cahill summarized it,

The American public as participant in the experience of art has developed a wide tolerance and a deep interest. I believe that we have today greater resources of popular interest in the visual arts than at any other time in our history.⁴⁶

By the end of 1936, over a million people had participated in free programs at these community art centers.⁴⁷ At the end of the program in 1943, 554 exhibitions had circulated to 2000 venues and included gallery lectures during which visitors learned how to analyze works of art.⁴⁸ Many artists credited the program with launching their successes and building a community of artists.⁴⁹

The Walker Art Center, the Roswell Art Museum and Art Center, and the South Side Community Arts Center in Chicago, dedicated to African American Art, were supported through state and community support after federal funding ended and still continue today, but of the over 100 community arts centers, most were not able to remain active after the WPA ended. However, even in some areas where the community arts centers could not continue, public interest in the arts remained, and after World War II when resources were once again available, museums were eventually built. The North Carolina Museum of Art is an example of this type of initiative and was built after all ten community art centers in North Carolina closed.⁵⁰

Cahill, too, was able to continue to promote the objectives of the WPA. For example, when Alfred Heber Holbrook, a New York attorney who had amassed an impressive American art collection, met Cahill at the Salmagundi Club in New York in 1944, Cahill made suggestions to Holbrook on potential permanent locations for his works, including the University of Georgia.⁵¹ Holbrook founded the Georgia Museum of Art in 1945 at the university, serving as its first director. In the spirit of the WPA-FAP and the Art Caravan, Holbrook reportedly used to load works of art in his car and drive them out to rural Georgia to share with communities that did not have exposure to art.⁵² Although this practice does not exist today, traveling exhibitions and statewide outreach programs to libraries and community centers continue to serve Holbrook's vision for the collection. The museum remains a free institution for all visitors.

Although museum projects came out of the WPA-FAP, most notably through the Exhibition Department,⁵³ Tina Nolan points out that unlike libraries, there was not a line of funding through the WPA-FAP dedicated to museums. In the examples described above, the people facilitating the programs and creating the educational resources were visual artists. As a result, the institutions were left out of federal aid opportunities. Writing in the Journal of Museum Education in 2010, Nolan warns that then and now, museums must be relevant to the communities of which they were a part to justify their worth.⁵⁴ This argument reflects Youtz's statement about the 69th Street Branch and the need to demonstrate that museums deserve support.⁵⁵

The continued legacy of the WPA-FAP in museum education

Though many of the arts centers and programs started under the Works Progress Administration Federal Arts Project closed with the end of the program in 1943, the legacy of the WPA-FAP on contemporary museum education exists in contemporary museum education practice through audience-centered policies and programs. Traveling exhibitions, outreach initiatives, studio art classes, artist residencies, and community-focused programming all reflect the goals of making the art museum today into what Roosevelt called a “living museum,” one that “is woven into the very warp and woof of our democracy.” By making art accessible to the public, Roosevelt championed the potential for the museum to “enrich and invigorate our cultural life by bringing the best of modern art to the American people.”⁵⁶

Museums today continue to strive to make their collections relevant and accessible in a variety of ways. In the years since AAM called upon museums to “master civic engagement,”⁵⁷ museum educators have been tasked with the goals of addressing social concerns and creating programming that is responsive and inclusive to the diverse communities they serve.⁵⁸ Today, many museums provide greater access to community audiences by offering special days with free admission, and often including community-focused events and activities that are interesting and relevant to public audiences. Programs like First Saturdays at the Brooklyn Museum of Art and others use feedback and input from the community to design programming that is relevant and meaningful for local audiences.⁵⁹ Nina Simon advocates for this type of “community-first program design,” in which museum professionals “identify communities and then develop or co-create programs that are relevant to their assets, needs and values,” instead of designing programs and then seeking audiences to participate.⁶⁰ These criticisms are similar to those of the Art Caravan program as there continues to be a need for museums to work with members of the community, instead of for them. Simon calls for a shift from the “service model” in which people in the community are “passive consumers” to programs with participants serving as “active agents in their own experience.”⁶¹ This idea aligns with the concept of “multi-vocality” in community-museum exhibitions that share “authority and expertise” by working with audiences through community partnerships in the initial planning and design phases of programming, rather than after decisions have been made. By creating spaces in which participants' voices are an authentic and integral part of exhibitions and programs, museums are able to reflect the experiences, ideas, and cultures of the community.⁶² Visitor-centered education programs in today's museums reflect the evolving shift in focus from the object to the visitor,⁶³ as museum educators have reoriented their practices toward programming and pedagogy that is responsive to the diverse and multifaceted communities they serve.⁶⁴

Another hallmark of WPA-FAP that is an essential part of art museum programming today is the practice of hiring teaching artists to work closely with the public through outreach and studio programs. In today's art museums, artist in residence (AIR) programs and programs led by teaching artists offer unique opportunities for collaborations between artists and museum staff, often with the goal of deepening engagement with local communities. Founded in 1968, the Artist in Residence program at the Studio Museum in Harlem continues to this day, with three artists selected for residencies each year who create works of art and participate in public and educational programming.⁶⁵ Most AIR initiatives in museums include a community engagement component in the form of workshops, lectures, and outreach programs, as evidenced by programs such as The Studios at MASS MoCA,⁶⁶ the Artist Residency Program at the Hammer Museum,⁶⁷ and the Artist-in-Residence program at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum,⁶⁸ among others. The Metropolitan Museum of Art recently started the Civic Practice Partnership, a collaborative residency program for New York artists committed to social change, with the goal of developing collaborations between the museum and its local communities in Brooklyn and Manhattan.⁶⁹ A study of artist residencies in museums conducted by the Alliance of Artist Communities found that

curators and museum directors are especially interested in creating space for community interaction as part of the residency – significant opportunities for artists to interact with the public in ways that highlight the importance of the arts and the artists behind the work

and that artists in these roles can help the museum in their mission of “engaging new audiences, disseminating ideas, and creating meaningful interactions between artists and diverse communities.”⁷⁰ These goals echo the community-centered objectives of WPA-era museum education programs and policies, and reflect the efforts of today's museum educators to create accessible, responsive and experiential arts programs for diverse audiences.

Another continued legacy of the WPA-FAP is studio art classes offered by museums, which proliferated during the WPA era and are now a foundation of the education programs in art museums today. Led by museum staff and teaching artists, art-making programs in museums allow visitors to engage in experiential learning through doing and making.⁷¹ School, family and children's programs are the most common types of programs that incorporate art-making today,⁷² but museums also offer studio-based experiences for visitors of all ages. Some examples include the Cincinnati Art Museum's “Creative Encounters,” a monthly art program for adult visitors,⁷³ in-gallery artmaking stations called “Create-n-Takes” at the Denver Art Museum,⁷⁴ and Studio Art Courses at the Whitney Museum of American Art that are designed for visitors of all ages, including adults and seniors.⁷⁵ Some art classes even take place online, such as the Museum of Modern Art's online studio classes that combine video lectures and art historical information with self-guided studio activities that participants complete in their own time at home.⁷⁶

The legacy of the WPA also tells an important story about the value that was placed on the arts by the U.S. government at that time, even during a period of great struggle and economic depression. The call for museums to demonstrate their worth to the public, a core value of the WPA-FAP, is particularly resonant today, as federal funding cuts and proposals to eliminate federal cultural agencies threaten to drastically reduce support for museums.⁷⁷ The WPA had a 1935 budget of $1.4 billion dollars, around 6.7% of the GDP at that time.⁷⁸ Total spending from 1935–1943 was about $13.4 billion, of which an estimated 5% went to art-related work.⁷⁹ Adjusted for inflation, annual spending on the arts during this eight-year period amounted to roughly $1.6 billion in today's dollars. By contrast, the current $155 million annual budget for the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) comprises just 0.004% of the federal budget, amounting to just 47 cents per capita.⁸⁰ Of this overall NEA budget, $3.73 million in direct grants were awarded through the museums program in 2018.⁸¹ The WPA era offers an intriguing paradigm for what greater federal funding for the arts could look like today.

As museums face new funding challenges, it is critical now more than ever that museum educators strive to fulfill the basic principles of access, transparency, and community-centered museum policies that were fundamental to WPA-era programming. In 2002, Stephen Weil wrote of the changing relationship between museums and their public audiences:

No longer the passive body of the museum's first conception, doomed to be raised, elevated, refined, and uplifted, in short, to be ‘done’ – the public will have succeeded to activate control of this quite remarkable and uniquely powerful instrument. The museum will still do, but this time it will be the public, in all its plurality, that determines what it does.⁸²

The lessons of the WPA-FAP arts programs – which prioritized public service, access, diversity and visitor-centered program design – are evident in today's museum education practice through traveling exhibitions, studio-focused, experiential programs and outreach initiatives that bring art directly into the hands of the people. These shared experiences reflect Cahill's belief that “the resources for art in America depend … upon opportunities provided for the people as a whole to participate in the experience of art.”⁸³

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

About the authors

Carissa DiCindio is Assistant Professor of Art and Visual Culture Education, University of Arizona with a focus on art museum education. Prior to this position, she was the Curator of Education at the Georgia Museum of Art. She began in the field of museum education in 2003. She holds an M.A. in art history and a Ph.D. in art education from the University of Georgia.

Callan Steinmann is Curator of Education at the Georgia Museum of Art, where she has worked as a museum educator since 2013. She holds an M.A. in art education with a focus in museum education from the University of Texas at Austin and a PhD in art education from the University of Georgia. She teaches courses in aesthetic education, museum education, and museum studies at UGA.

Notes

1 Schwarzer, Riches, Rivals, and Radicals, 130–41.

2 Adam, The Civic Value of Museums. See also, Zeller, “The Historical and Philosophical Foundations of Museum Education,” 39.

3 Rice, “Balancing Act,” 13.

4 Rea, The Museum and the Community. See also, Rice, “Balancing Act,” 13, and Zeller, “The Historical and Philosophical Foundations of Museum Education,” 38.

5 See note 3 above.

6 Burnham and Kai-Kee, Teaching in the Art Museum, 28.

7 Ibid., 27.

8 Hein, Progressive Museum Practice, 11.

9 Ibid., See pages 21–38 for a discussion on Dewey's philosophy.

10 Ibid., 76. See also, Russo, “The Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project Reconsidered,” 19.

11 Grieve, The Federal Art Project and the Creation of Middlebrow Culture, 94–5.

12 Mathews, “Arts and the People,” 320.

13 Ibid., 319.

14 Harris, Federal Art and National Culture, 36–40.

15 Grieve, The Federal Art Project, 86.

16 O’Connor, “Introduction,” 17.

17 Jeffers, “Holger Calhill and American Art,” 9.

18 Jeffers, “Holger Calhill and American Art,” 5–8. See also, Taylor, American-made, 272–3.

19 Russo, “The Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project Reconsidered,” 20–1.

20 Harris, Federal Art and National Culture, 28–36.

21 McDonald, Federal Relief Administration and the Arts, 385.

22 Russo, “The Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project Reconsidered,” 21.

23 Funk, “Education in the Federal Art Project,” 92.

24 Cahill, “Forward: American Resources in the Arts,” 43.

25 Funk, “Education in the Federal Art Project,” 92–3.

26 Kornfeld, “The Educational Program of the Federal Art Project,” 101.

27 Funk, “Education in the Federal Art Project,” 93.

28 Ibid., 89–90. See also, McDonald, Federal Relief Administration and the Arts, 423.

29 Works Progress Administration, “Federal Sponsored Community Programs,” 11, as discussed in Kornfeld, “The Educational Program of the Federal Art Project,” 96.

30 Ibid., 94.

31 Ibid.

32 Hayes, “The Negro Artist Today,” 212.

33 Calo, Distinction and Denial, 103.

34 Bennett, “The Harlem Community Art Center,” 214.

35 Taylor, “Suspension of the WPA Museum Project,” 165.

36 Lundins, “Art Comes to the People,” 232–3. See also, Lampert, A People's Art History of the United States, 151.

37 Lundins, “Art Comes to the People,” 233. See also, Lampert, A People's Art History of the United States, 152, 326. As Lampert points out, Lundins’ essay is part of a collection of essays by artists and facilitators employed through the WPA written to retain Congress’ support of government funding. As such, the authors may have been overly positive in their assessments of the program.

38 Langa, Radical Art, 42. See also, Lampert, A People's Art History of the United States, 152.

39 Findlay and Findlay, WPA Museum Extension Project 1935–1943, 22.

40 See note 3 above.

41 Youtz, “The Sixty-Ninth Street Branch of the Pennsylvania Museum of Art,” 5–8. See also, McClellan, “A Brief History of the Art Museum Public,” 24 and Zeller, “The Historical and Philosophical Foundations of Museum Education,” 69.

42 Youtz, “Museums Among Public Services,” 70.

43 Rowson Love and Villeneuve, “Edu-Curation and the Edu-Curator,” 17.

44 Ibid.

45 Lampert, A People's Art History of the United States, 148.

46 Cahill, “Forward: American Resources in the Arts,” 35.

47 Taylor, American-made, 280.

48 See note 23 above.

49 McKinzie, The New Deal for Artists, 176.

50 Mathews, “Arts and the People,” 333.

51 Manoguerra, 100 American Paintings, 13.

52 Ibid., 16–17.

53 See note 22 above.

54 Nolan, “History Repeats Itself,” 118.

55 See note 42 above.

56 Roosevelt, “Only Where Men Are Free Can the Arts Flourish and the Civilization of National Culture Reach Full Flower,” 336.

57 Hirzy, Mastering Civic Engagement. Founded in 1906, the American Alliance of Museums was known as the American Association of Museums until 2012.

58 Long, “Practicing Civic Engagement,” 143.

59 Brooklyn Museum of Art, “Brooklyn Museum Draws Record-Breaking Attendance at a Target First Saturday.”

60 Simon, The Art of Relevance, 99.

61 Ibid., 95.

62 Pegno and Farrar, “Multivocal, Collaborative Practices,” 169.

63 Weil, “From Being about Something to Being for Somebody,” 229–58.

64 Anderson, Reinventing the Museum.

65 Studio Museum in Harlem, “Artist-in-Residence.”

66 MASS MoCA, “The Studios at MASS MoCA.”

67 Hammer Museum, “Artist Residencies.”

68 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, “Artists-in-Residence.”

69 Metropolitan Museum of Art, “The Met Launches a New Immersive Program.”

70 Madsen, “Residencies in Museums.”

71 Vogel, “From Show and Look to Show and Teach.”

72 Costantino, “Articulating Understanding Through Art Making,” 1–26.

73 Cincinnati Art Museum, “Art Making Experiences.”

74 Genshaft, “Explore New Artmaking Activities at the Denver Art Museum.”

75 Whitney Museum of American Art, “Art-making.”

76 MoMA, “Online Courses.”

77 Casco, “Trump's 2020 Budget.”

78 Smith, Building New Deal Liberalism, 87.

79 Digital History, “Jobs Programs.”

80 Americans for the Arts, “Statement on the President's FY19 Budget Proposal.”

81 National Endowment for the Arts, “Museums Fact Sheet.”

82 Weil, Making Museums Matter, 213.

83 Cahill, “Forward: American Resources in the Arts,” 43–4.