Tony+Bruno

==__Works Progress Administration- The New Deal 1930s__ During the great depression president Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave the name "The New Deal" to a series of programs designed to give relief, reform and recovery to the America suffering from the great depression. The Works Progress Administration (WPA) was designed for the benefit of working people and quickly became the largest government employment agency in the United States. Along with educating and training adults to intergrate them into the workforce and give them skills for all sorts of jobs, most popularly factory jobs.== ==The WPA funded many art projects for the beautification of public institutions and artists were often highered to produce posters and signs which would act as public service announcements. A lot of graphic artists were hired to silkscreen educational pieces as art was viewed as part of a larger educational means in during FDR's presidency. In the post-Y2K world we might view public service posters as being widely manufactured to look monotone, systemic and standardized but this was a very good oportunity for graphic artists of the time. Artists also designed theatre advertisements and travel posters on commission as hand lettering posters was a popular practice during this time.==

==Aside from applied arts there were many artists who dabbled in the worlds of painting, printing, photography, sculpting and drawing who were comissioned by the WPA. A common theme of this time was the personal and social impacts of the great depression which lasted from 1928-1939. Art that encompasses this is now considered "social realism." One of the most well known artists of the depression era would be Dorothea Lange. She worked for the Farm Security Administration as a photojournalist.== [|Social Realism]
 * [[image:461px-Lange-MigrantMother02.jpg width="356" height="465"]] ||< This is the most famous of Dorothea Lange's photos from the depression era called "Migrant Mother." Along with being important to the zeitgeist of the time but Lange also became a landmark artist for the genre of documentary photography. Her images are telling on several levels. For the people living in depression era America her work gave an image to middle america and acted to educate people on what was going on and visually historicises this time. The portraits of these people are also more widely moving in the context of the human struggle. [|Dorothea Lange's Photography] ||