Celebrating Heroes: American Mural Studies of the 1930s and 1940s from the Steven and Susan Hirsch Collection

Organized by the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, this exhibition features almost 50 drawings that provide an intimate look at the thinking processes of artists who competed for New Deal mural commissions in the 1930s and 1940s. During this golden age for murals in America, the participants in President Franklin Roosevelt's jobs programs for artists took inspiration from the panels of Mexican muralists in which everyday workers became monumental heroes. While most of these drawings are by painters associated with the art colony of Woodstock, New York, the exhibition presents studies for mural competitions in various parts of the nation. Some works are the only evidence we have for an artist’s ideas for a mural, since some designs were rejected and never executed.