In the News: Restoration of WPA Murals

Admiration of New Deal Works of Art Florishing (USA Today, November 22, 2010) Judy Keen highlights efforts to discover and restore Works Progress Administration murals in schools and post offices. The article includes an image of Horses in Children's Literature, a 1940 frieze by Ethel Spears that inspires kindergarten students in a Chicago school.

Heather Becker, who highlights Chicago's WPA murals in a video that accompanies the online article, is the author of
Art for the People: The Rediscovery and Preservation of Progressive- and WPA-era Murals in the Chicago Public Schools, 1904-1943 (Chronicle Books, 2002). Mary Gray's A Guide to Chicago's Murals (University of Chicago Press, 2001) includes full-color illustrations of nearly two hundred Chicago murals, biographies of more than 150 artists, and a glossary of key terms. 

Digital Collections of WPA Art
Women Artists of the WPA (Case Western Reserve University Library) offers biographical profiles and images of works by Jolan Gross-Bettelheim, Dorothy Rutka, and Gladys Carambell.

New Deal Registry is a guide to surviving public art that was created under the New Deal programs, 1934-1943. Browse by state, then city.

Works Projects Administration Murals in California (San Diego State University) For background information about this database, see Laurel Bliss and Melissa Lamont, "Documenting WPA Murals in California," Art Documentation 29 (Spring 2010): 4-10.

WPA women painters, Federal Art Gallery

By the People, For the People: Posters from the WPA, 1936-1943 (Library of Congress) includes works by Katherine Milhous, Mildred Waltrip, and other women artists.

Harlem Hospitals WPA Murals (Columbia University) includes a biographical profile of Georgette Seabrooke and a slideshow of Seabrooke's Recreation in Harlem.



Oral History Interviews 
Oral history interview with Helen Lundeberg, 1980 July 19-Aug. 29 (Archives of American Art) Among other topics, Lundeberg discusses painting murals for the WPA Federal Art Project.

Oral History Interview with Ruth Gikow, 1964 (Archives of American Art) Gikow recalls mural painting at the Bronx Hospital for the Federal Art Project.

Explore Further

New Deal Arts / Culture (U.S. National Archives) This guide covers books, National Archives and Records Administration resources, related collections in the Washington, D.C. area, and related web sites.

 

Esther Bubley, Photojournalist

Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography,which is open through March 21, 2011 at the Museum of Modern Art, features the work of outstanding female photographers including Diane Arbus, Tina Modotti, Cindy Sherman, Carrie Mae Weems, and Esther Bubley among many others.

Born in 1921 to Jewish immigrants, Bubley became one of the best-known photographers of her time. Her evocative photographs of mid-twentieth century America captured our national identity and influenced popular culture. Movie scholar Paula Rabinowitz claims Bubley’s photographs of women working in factories and offices during World War II contributed to a staple character of the film noir genre, the strong-willed independent woman.

Bubley’s subjects ranged from the ordinary — bus riders, hospital patients, teenagers, boardinghouse residents — to the extraordinary including renowned individuals like Albert Einstein and Marianne Moore. Bubley’s work appeared in Look, Life, and Ladies’ Home Journal. She also worked for the Office of War Information, ultimately spending six weeks on a cross-country tour documenting the American nation at war. In the late 1940s, she photographed Texas oil towns for Standard Oil. Bubley was the first woman to win Photography magazine’s competition for international work.

Since her death in 1998, Bubley’s popularity has continued to grow. Her niece Jean Bubley maintains a website about the photographer. The site features a slide show of Bubley’s work, a video biography, and a calendar of current and upcoming museum exhibitions which include Bubley’s work. For researchers, the site also provides important information about copyright and the use of Bubley’s work in publication.

For more information about Bubley and her work, see Beverly W. Brannan, “Private Eye,” Smithsonian Magazine, March 2004; Amy Pastan, Fields of Vision: The Photographs of Esther Bubley (D. Giles, 2010); Bonnie Yochelson, Esther Bubley: On Assignment (Aperture, 2005). The Library of Congress featured Bubley’s work on its website about female photojournalists.

Callie House and the Struggle for Ex-Slave Reparations

Miranda Booker Perry, "No Pensions for Ex-Slaves: How Federal Agencies Suppressed Movement To Aid Freedpeople," Prologue 42 (Summer 2010). 

Callie House was a national leader in the movement to grant pensions to ex-slaves. In 1898, the former slave was elected assistant secretary of the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty & Pension Association of the United States of America (MRB&PA). In this article, Perry describes how the Bureau of Pensions, the Post Office Department, and the Justice Department undermined the efforts of House, Isaiah Dickerson, and the MRB&PA.

The article includes a broadside with photos of House and Dickerson (below), a Certificate of Membership in the MRB&PA, and an ex-slave pension bill that proposed a pension payment scale based upon the age of beneficiaries.

This broadside features both Isaiah Dickerson and Callie House (Records of the Department of Veterans Affairs, RG 15)

For more information about House and her role in the MRB&PA, see Mary Frances Berry's My Face is Black is True: Callie House and the Struggle for Ex-Slave Reparations (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005).

New Book - The Undaunted Women of Nanking: The Wartime Diaries of Minnie Vautrin and Tsen Shui-fang

The Undaunted Women of Nanking: The Wartime Diaries of Minnie Vautrin and Tsen Shui-fang. Edited and Translated by Huey-ling Hu and Zhang Lian-hong. Carbondale : Southern Illinois University Press, 2010.
Link: WorldCat record (with Google Books Preview)

The Rape of Nanking refers to the Japanese invasion and occupation of Nanking, China, from December of 1937 to February 1938. Historians estimate that Japanese soldiers killed between 200,000 and 300,000 Chinese and raped between 20,000 and 80,000 women.

Minnie Vautrin (1886-1941) and Tsen Shui-fang (1875-1969) turned Ginling College into a refugee camp that protected thousands of women and children during the Rape of Nanking. Their diaries, juxtaposed in this new edited collection,  provide detailed accounts of life in the refugee camp.

This is the first English translation of Tsen Shui-fang’s diary. Although Vautrin's diary is also available online (pdf) as part of Yale's Nanking Massacre Project,  it lacks the editorial notes in The Undaunted Women of Nanking. For additional information about Vautrin, see Hua-ling Hu's American Goddess at the Rape of Nanking: The Courage of Minnie Vautrin (Southern Illinois University Press, 2000) and American National Biography.