News
The University of California, Berkeley, mistakenly sold a masterwork by WPA sculptor Sargent Johnson for $150. The 22-foot-long redwood carving, reportedly valued at around a million dollars, had been misplaced and sold as surplus. In March, the Berkeley City Council… read more
“A Voice: What Can a Voice Change? Everything,” was the theme of the 32nd Annual Steinbeck Festival, held May 3-6 at the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, California. A celebration of the work of John Steinbeck and Woody Guthrie, the… read more
San Francisco’s Coit Tower is known around the world. Inside are 27 WPA murals by 25 artists that depict life in California during the 1930s. Decades of neglect threaten the murals. Although the landmark generates more than enough revenue for… read more
University of Missouri, Kansas City, Economics professor John Henry (a honorable name in its own right) writes that the federal government can – and should – create jobs, just as it did under the New Deal. See Prof. Henry’s remarks… read more
Maine’s Republican Governor, Paul LePage, recently ordered the removal of a mural in the state Department of Labor that he considered too ‘biased’ toward workers. The mural is of recent origin, but the precedent is not good for the many… read more
In the corner of a 100-square-foot mural painted on a wall of Coit Tower, Ruth Gottstein is forever memorialized. Just 12 years old in the painting, she has a short, pageboy haircut, and soft, thoughtful eyes. She’s clutching a notebook,… read more
An unexpected benefit from the recent sale of the old Modesto P.O. is that a story about the sale and missing murals in the Modesto Bee triggered the memory of a reader who recalled seeing two such artworks in a family storage… read more
New Deal murals by WPA artist Gino Conte were unveiled recently at the University of Rhode Island. Ironically, construction workers hired under the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, a federal jobs program, rediscovered the murals, which had been hidden behind… read more
The nation is now experiencing the most severe jobs crisis since the Great Depression. President Barack Obama’s jobs plan will provide a much-needed extension of unemployment benefits and a payroll tax cut for working Americans. Nevertheless, only a federally funded… read more
Oklahoma is now ready to accept and celebrate native son Woody Guthrie, the seminal American folk singer who died in 1967. The state resisted honoring Guthrie for decades because of his leftist politics. “I ain’t a Communist necessarily,” Guthrie said,… read more
