Women of the WPA

The Works Progress Administration (renamed the Works Projects Administration in 1939) was an American New Deal agency created to provide jobs for the unemployed, to build infrastructure, to document American history and to create new works of art. This exhibition complements “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, and focuses specifically on the contributions of women to WPA art, including works by Lucienne Bloch, Marie Bleck, Marguerite Redman Dorgeloh, Helen Lundeberg, Minnetta Good, Jennie Lewis, Ann Nooney, Elizabeth Olds and others. Thanks to Lamar Dodd and museum founder Alfred Heber Holbrook, the Georgia Museum of Art’s collection has been historically strong in WPA-era artists, and we continue actively to collect both works of this time period and works by woman artists.