Ilya Bolotowsky Sites

Ilya Bolotowsky’s oil painting study for the Hall of Sciences mural at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York is today housed in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. It is all that remains of Bolotowsky’s mural commissioned by the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Arts Projects, as all murals made for the World’s Fair were destroyed at the Fair’s closure (Mahoney, p. 261). Bolotowsky is a generally overlooked pioneer of American abstract art and this work is a testament to the brilliance of his art, which he was given ample opportunity to practice through the New Deal. Thus,...

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...

Several different schools are located in this building. This untitled New Deal mosaic by Ilya Bolotowsky is located on the 3rd floor. It was installed in 1936.