Henry Varnum Poor Sites

The New Deal is responsible for a magnificent array of artworks that embellish the Department of Justice building. The Treasury Section of Fine Arts commissioned artists to create 68 murals between 1936 and 1941 for $68,000, or one percent of the building cost.  The building’s murals depict scenes of daily life from American history and allegories on the role of justice in American society. Henry Varnum Poor painted a complex, 12-panel fresco mural, "Justice Department Bureaus and Divisions," in 1936. The first set of panels around the doorways of rooms 5111 and 5114 depict the ac­tivities of the Bureau of Prisons and the...

The painted, glazed ceramic tile mural titled "Grape Harvest" was made for the interior of the post office in 1942 by Henry Varnum Poor under the auspices of the Treasury Section of Fine Arts.

The Stewart Lee Udall Department of the Interior building contains one of the largest collections of New Deal art in Washington DC by some of the finest American artists of the time. The Department of Interior Museum organizes tours by prior arrangement.  Henry Varnum Poor painted "Conservation of American Wildlife" in 1939, with funding from the Treasury Section of Fine Arts.  This enormous fresco, covering an entire end wall at the north end of the 3d floor corridor,  acknowledges the work of the Bureau of Biological Survey and Bureau of Fisheries (reorganized into the US Fish and Wildlife Service in 1940)....

The Uptown Post Office Murals “Carl Sandburg and Louis Sullivan” were WPA New Deal Art Projects completed in 1943 by Henry Varnum Poor. These are significant murals created by the WPA which celebrates both agriculture and poetry (Uptown PO Chicago). At the time the murals were created, Poor was an established artist - one of the few non-relief artists who was allowed on the project because many unemployed craftsmen could be put to work executing his designs. His notability also gave the projects an air of respectability (Bernstein). Poor, who was born in Chapman, Kansas, studied art at Stanford University and...