Albert Swinden Sites

In 1936, "when the United States was still reeling from the Great Depression, a series of murals was commissioned by the Federal Art Project (FAP), to be painted in the community rooms at the Williamsburg Public Housing development in Brooklyn, NY. This development was built in 1936-37, designed by the chief architect William Lescaze. The head of the New York Murals of the FAP division in 1937 was Burgoyne Diller. It was a brave move to commission a series of abstract murals from avant-garde, relatively unknown artists. At the time, most murals (perhaps all) were figurative... The artists whose murals were found in the...

Then known as the Welfare Hospital for Chronic Disease, this hospital on New York's Roosevelt Island opened in 1939. The hospital soon received three rare 7 x 50 foot WPA murals by Ilya Bolotowsky (1907-1981), Joseph Rugolo (1911-1983) and Albert Swinden (1901-1961). "The murals must have caused a sensation in the early 1940s, when they were installed in the patients’ circular day rooms by the federal Work Projects Administration. Not your standard W.P.A. social-realist allegories, these were works of almost pure, jazzlike abstraction, bold fields of color that barely suggested any literal imagery."   (nytimes.com) At some point in the following years, all three...