Artists with St. Louis connections featured in The Work of Art

The Work of Art: The Federal Art Project, 1935–1943 features nearly 60 works from the Museum’s collection, organized geographically by the 11 cities in which they were made. While St. Louis is not represented in that list, three artists appearing in the exhibition have ties to the region. 

The exhibition offers the opportunity to encounter artists that many viewers might not yet have met. Works of art created under the auspices of the FAP were widely distributed as part of government-organized exhibitions in the 1930s and ’40s. However, while these artists had nationwide exposure during the period, much of their work has since been forgotten.   

As part of their research for The Work of Art, exhibition co-curators Amy Torbert, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Associate Curator of American Art, and Clare Kobasa, associate curator of prints, drawings, and photographs, reviewed census documents from the period to learn about some of the lesser-known artists.  

That’s when they met Weldon Sugarmon Smith.  

Weldon Sugarmon Smith 

Smith’s painting is among a batch of 15 works in the exhibition from Memphis, all created by children at the LeMoyne Federal Art Center from 1938 to 1941. Smith was around 13 when she painted Aquarium in 1938. She went on to study guidance counseling at Northwestern University before moving to St. Louis and teaching at Washington Technical High School. In 1946, she married Dr. Sidney Smith; they raised three sons and remained in St. Louis the rest of their lives. She died in late 2023. 

Called “Sugar” by family and friends, she fought for social equality and legal justice through civic volunteerism and served on the boards of Stowe Teachers College, the Urban League of St. Louis, and the Metropolitan YWCA.  

While the exhibition was still in the planning phase, the Museum was able to reunite Smith with her work in 2021 for the first time in eight decades. Aquarium was put on view for Weldon and her son Barry Smith to see in the Level 3 American galleries. 

Fred Becker 

Represented in the New York section of the exhibition, Fred Becker spent his formative years working for the WPA’s Federal Art Project. He originally came to New York from California to study architecture, though he abandoned that in favor of fine arts. His wood engraving Elevated Station depicts the Sixth Avenue elevated station at 8th Street in New York City. He carved the wood block while sitting in a booth of a diner across the street.  

Becker’s career as an artist continued after the end of FAP, with time spent at Atelier 17, a printmaking workshop in New York, before he moved to St. Louis near the end of the 1940s. He established the print department at Washington University in St. Louis and introduced printmaking to generations of students from 1948 to 1968. He later taught at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. Becker died in Massachusetts in 2004. 

Myron Kozman 

Born in 1916 in Indiana to Russian Jewish immigrants, Myron Kozman also lived in Ohio and Michigan before receiving a scholarship in 1937 to attend the newly opened New Bauhaus, an art and design school in Chicago. 

He held several artist appointments under the FAP in Chicago, which is when he created the two color screenprints in SLAM’s collection: Abstraction #202 and Abstraction #208. Kozman was among the first artists in Chicago to adopt screenprinting as a fine art medium. He created the shapes, colors, and textures in these prints by wiping inks through the surface of a fine mesh screen with a squeegee. Poster designs, including those created by FAP artists working in screenprinting workshops in New York City, inspired him to experiment with this technique. 

Kozman graduated from New Bauhaus in 1942 in its first class, along with Juliet Kepes, Nate Lerner, Charles Niedringhaus, and Grace Seelig. He went on to serve in World War II, then studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology. In the 1960s, he lived in Milwaukee where he served as the head of the design department at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. In 1970, Kozman moved to St. Louis to become the chairman of art at Webster College (now University), and in 1976, he started teaching art at St. Mary’s High School in St. Louis. In addition to teaching, Kozman also performed in local community theater and St. Mary’s–associated productions and was featured in a 1996 St. Louis Artists Guild exhibition. He died in St. Louis in 2002.  

The Work of Art: The Federal Art Project, 1935–1943 is on view until April 13 in Gallery 235 and the Sidney S. and Sadie M. Cohen Gallery 234.