Art with an Expert: “Art for the Millions — The New Deal and American Art During the Great Depression”

Included with museum admission. All attendees requested to register due to limited seating. FREE for Blanton Members, UT-Austin ID holders, K-12 Teachers w/ID, and kids (5 & under). Attending Senior Social before this program? Your ticket includes admission to Art with an Expert. From 1933 to 1945, the federal government responded to the crisis of the Great Depression with the New Deal: political measures, economic programs, and cultural projects aimed at providing relief, recovery, and reform. The government also became the major patron of American art, supplying work relief for artists through projects like the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Women artists, working class artists, and artists of color gained unprecedented opportunities and public visibility during the New Deal as the artistic playing field expanded to a much broader range of American art styles, exhibition spaces, and audiences. In short, New Deal art was part of a grand, sometimes controversial, and remarkably successful experiment in government economic and cultural intervention. Complementing the exhibition Art in Every Corner: The Works Progress Administration, this talk looks at the impact and influence of the New Deal on American art, and its relevance today.   About the Speaker: Erika Doss (Ph.D., University of Minnesota) is a Distinguished Professor in the Edith O Donnell Institute of Art History at the University of Texas at Dallas. Her wide-ranging interests in modern and contemporary American art are reflected in the breadth of her publications, including Benton, Pollock, and the Politics of Modernism: From Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism (1991, which received the Charles C. Eldredge Prize), Spirit Poles and Flying Pigs: Public Art and Cultural Democracy in American Communities (1995), Elvis Culture: Fans, Faith, and Image (1999), Looking at Life Magazine (editor, 2001), The Emotional Life of Contemporary Public Memorials: Towards a Theory of Temporary Memorials (2008), Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America (2010), Monumental Troubles: Rethinking What Monuments Mean Today (editor, 2018), and Spiritual Moderns: Twentieth-Century American Artists and Religion (2023). The recipient of several Fulbright awards, Doss has held fellowships at the Stanford Humanities Center, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Rockwell Center for American Visual Studies, and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.