Art with an Expert – What is the Role of Art in a Democracy? Lessons from the New Deal with John P. Murphy

At the height of the Great Depression, with the economy in ruins and fascism on the rise, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal turned crisis into opportunity. Through unprecedented federal funding for the arts, the New Deal launched the careers of artists such as Dorothea Lange, Jacob Lawrence, Alice Neel, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko, while advancing a bold vision of cultural democracy: art by the people, for the people. This talk considers the promises and pitfalls of the New Deal art programs, drawing lessons for today on the role of art in a democratic society. Followed by a Book Signing in our Museum Store (books available for purchase). If you have any issues clicking through to tickets, please visit this link instead. Art With an Expert is organized by the Blanton Museum of Art. Support for this program at the Blanton is provided by the Carolyn Harris Hynson Centennial Endowment. ABOUT THE SPEAKER John P. Murphy is the Philip and Lynn Straus Curator of Prints and Drawings at The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College. A scholar of American art, he is the author of New Deal Art: Culture and Crisis in the Great Depression, published by Thames & Hudson’s World of Art series. From 2018 to 2021 Murphy served as the Hoehn Curatorial Fellow for Prints at the University of Diego where he curated Storywork: The Prints of Marie Watt, a traveling retrospective co-organized with the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation. In his position as Research Associate and COSI/Mellon Fellow at the Art Institute of Chicago, Murphy curated Flesh: Ivan Albright (2018) and conducted research for Charles White: A Retrospective (2018). Recent scholarship has appeared in Print Quarterly, Art in Print, American Communist History, and Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art. His research has been supported with grants and fellowships from the Winterthur Museum, the Huntington Library, the Tamiment Library (NYU), and the Wolfsonian Museum. He received his PhD from Northwestern University in 2017.