Gray Brechin and The Living New Deal are profiled extensively in this month’s Guidelines, the San Francisco City Guides newsletter. Check it out here for an explanation of our site, of the New Deal, and of the need for a new New Deal today.
Living New Deal Project Advisor Harvey Smith recently spoke to KPFA Evening News to discuss The Living New Deal and LaborFest. Skip ahead to the 26 minute mark to hear Harvey’s interview in full.
“‘You need to crouch over to be at a child’s height, I think, to appreciate them fully,” Maroney said. ‘I love that the hospital has kept them that way and has resisted the temptation to put them up on outdoor pedestals.'”
Read more here about recent efforts to restore the Cayuga Medical Center’s eight animal sculptures, created by WPA artists and representing “the only work from WPA Federal Arts Project in Tompkins County.”
A fixture of the mid-century Woodstock arts scene, Wendell Jones painted four murals for the New Deal’s Section of Fine Arts. His works were admired by government officials and his peers alike, including Philip Guston.
From June to October 2014, the Woodstock Artists Association and Museum held the first major retrospective of Jones’s work since the 1950s. Rediscovering Wendell Jones, 1899-1956 showcased an artist conformable in a range of forms: His sunbaked Southwestern cityscapes, his cluttered and overcast Hudson Valley landscapes, abstract expressionist paintings from the 1950s. The exhibit also presented the four New Deal murals Jones was commissioned to paint in the Midwest and the South. The Living New Deal has previously marked Jones’s work on our map. But only recently did Peter Jones hear about us and reach out to let us know about this major exhibit of his father’s work. Peter Jones was generous enough to send us the accompanying catalogue. This slim volume beautifully captures the variety of Wendell Jones’s paintings, and features a foreword by Josephine Bloodgood, the Executive Director and Curator of the WAAM’s Permanent Collection, and an introduction by Peter Jones that draws together personal memories and extant scholarship. There is also a helpful chronology of the artist’s life, vivified through photographs from the family collection. The result is a sense of Wendell Jones’s work in the context of his own personal and creative development, as well as his devotion to New Deal civic-mindedness.
Indeed, Jones’s New Deal murals display a range of moods and circumstances. If Jones’s paintings for the Section of Fine Arts are unified by the theme of collective work, their subject matters traverse eras and moods. First Pulpit in Granville, painted for the Granville, Ohio, post office in 1938, is a lush, densely packed historical epic of community building through the religious revivals of a century earlier, its figures bathed in light. Indeed, Jones believed, according to art historian Karal Ann Marling, that depictions of local history “could stir up in local residents a feeling of pride in their present circumstances, because such events were a part of local consicousnes, in which the aspirations of forefathers and descendants met.” Farmer Family, painted for the Johnson City, Tennessee, post office in 1940, illustrates vigorous industrial and rural work among Johnson City’s inhabitants—train conductors, construction workers, dairy farmers, and lounging workers in overalls smoking, eating, debating. So much activity clustered together, with little room to breathe. One wonders, in this painting, if “family” is a word whose meaning is symbolic.
Jones’s work is currently housed in private collections, as well as the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College, the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth, and the de Young Museum in San Francisco. In order to purchase the catalogue to Rediscovering Wendell Jones, contact the Woodstock Artists Association and Museum.
From June 21-23, landscape architects, historians, program designers, and other park professionals converged on Santa Fe for A Century of Design in the Parks, a symposium marking the centennial of the National Park Service. 150 people attended this sold out conference.
The Living New Deal was well represented. Our project’s Founder, Gray Brechin, delivered “A New Deal for the Arts and Crafts,” a biography of architect Herbert Maier, whose Rustic Style buildings are themselves landmarks in America’s national parks. Our Communications Director, Susan Ives, provided historical context for the Civilian Conservation Corps in “Cultural Landscapes of the New Deal.” Susan also moderated a panel on the New Deal in the Southwest. Project Advisor Harvey Smith presented a poster, “Remembering the New Deal in the Parks,” arguing for the necessity of a CCC-style program today.
As the Associated Press notes in “In New Mexico, New Deal legacy gets a second look,” the choice of Santa Fe as a conference location was apt: The city is dotted with public works and art that owe their existence to various New Deal programs. Beloved buildings and parks showcase the craftsmanship that marks so many New Deal sites, with their twin emphases on durability and a beauty reflecting the surrounding landscape. (Exhibit A: The Old Santa Fe Trail Building.) The article also provides some much-welcomed publicity for The Living New Deal, emphasizing our site’s importance in chronicling a moment in history that, in the words of Nina Roosevelt Gibson (Franklin and Eleanor’s granddaughter), “would be difficult or impossible to replicate today—but still serve as call to collective action.” Susan Ives is also featured in this article, where she explains the disavowal of the New Deal’s legacy, and the importance in crowd-sourcing our map to people who can share family stories or bring the expertise of personal archives and experience: Many of the plaques that used to mark public works as New Deal sites “were taken down when the pendulum swung to the right.”
The legacy of public investment and public service exemplified by the New Deal in the parks has been typically overlooked. Furthermore, Congress has starved the parks to the point that the NPS is essentially selling the parks off to corporations that use the parks for branding purposes. (Current visions for a new Civilian Conservation Corps have even proposed a similar kind of corporate branding.) The New Deal offers a different model.
Susan Ives contributed to this post.
The Living New Deal recently made news for its participation in “A Century of Design in the Parks,” a symposium marking the centennial of the National Park Service, which was held in Santa Fe from June 21-23. In an article entitled, “In New Mexico, New Deal legacy gets a second look,” the Associated Press makes a case for our project’s importance and even interviews our Communications Director, Susan Ives!
At The Living New Deal, we’ve long been tracking rumblings of a new New Deal in American political circles. So often, though, that conversation centers on the biographies and affiliations of major politicians. Over at The American Prospect, Christopher Faricy takes a bottom-up perspective in his article, “Is It Time for a New New Deal?” Maybe young people today don’t have the sentimental attachments to FDR that, say, Bill de Blasio has; but the socioeconomic realities they face have made New Deal policies an obvious solution—whether or not they invoke (or even know to invoke) Roosevelt.
Indeed, Faricy attributes Hillary Clinton’s “increasingly liberal tilt … not just in response to the Sanders insurgency, but to burgeoning demographic and economic trends that will last well beyond the 2016 presidential election.” The generation coming into adulthood today has grown up in an America “defined by privatization, deregulation, and devolution.” Along with people reacting against growing income inequality and the evaporation of worker protections, an increasingly diverse electorate also accounts for a population supporting social services and workers’ rights.
What would a new New deal look like? Faricy describes recent political promises of better health care coverage, increased access to college, universal basic income, and more. The middle-class would have to pay its share, along with the wealthy. But he also suggests that many Americans are ready to do so, so long as people in power “respond to their calls for economic equity, income security, and a more sustainable social safety net.”
Jensen Point, a Pacific, Missouri, park overlooking famed Route 66, has reopened to the public. The site, constructed by Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) Company 1770 in 1939, has been closed for the past 25 years, during which time it fell into disrepair. A recent blog post for the Washington Missourian details the history and recent preservation efforts to save the park. Thanks to the work of citizen Wayne Winchester, city government, and the St. Louis County Municipal Parks Grant Commission, Jensen Point has now been returned to a position of prominence in Pacific and preserved for future visitors–including you!
Ken Herman’s “Old stuff from the New Deal” (Austin American-Statesman, Friday, May 13, 2016) makes a case for The Living New Deal’s relevance to communities around the country. (Larry Moore, our Texas-based Research Associate, also gets some well-deserved recognition in this opinion piece.) Herman draws from our site to showcase the New Deal’s legacy in Austin–“highways and bridges and parks and buildings and lots of stuff still in use in Austin, ranging from the mundane to the majestic.” Some (from bridges to parks to university dorms) continue to serve their original purpose. Others still stand, but have been repurposed—including the US Post Office in somewhat-nearby Lampasas, built in 1938 and converted into a single-family home in 2010. (The fates of most New Deal post offices remain uncertain throughout the country. And if they’re closed down, they typically see less cheery fates than the one in Lampasas.) It is a testament to the quality and craftsmanship that went into New Deal construction that its physical presence remains, integrated into our communities “to the point of taking it for granted.”
“The first thing that stopped me in my tracks was the two mosaics from 1934 that flank the building’s original doors. Then I stepped in and saw the flowered wood paneling. Finally I lifted my head and saw the faded glorious interior murals by two important San Francisco artists — Helen K. Forbes and Dorothy W. Pucinelli, both working under the auspices of President Franklin Roosevelt’s WPA…. ‘Don’t forget to breathe,’ joked Joe Fitting, deputy director of the San Francisco Zoo.”
Read more about San Francisco Chronicle reporter Caille Millner’s visit to the SF Zoo Mothers Building here. Millner details efforts (helmed by Living New Deal friend Richard Rothman) to save the structure and its threatened New Deal artwork.