Curator Q&A: The Work of Art: The Federal Art Project, 1935–1943

In 1943, the Saint Louis Art Museum, then called the City Art Museum of St. Louis, received 256 prints, drawings, watercolors, and paintings made under the Federal Art Project, which put over 10,000 artists to work during the Great Depression. The Work of Art: The Federal Art Project, 1935–1943 showcases a selection of those works from the Museum’s collection, including some that have rarely or never before been on view.  

Exhibition cocurators Clare Kobasa, associate curator of prints, drawings, and photographs, and Amy Torbert, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Associate Curator of American Art, have answered questions about the free exhibition, which is on view through April 13, 2025. 

In a collection of more than 36,000 objects, how did you become interested in this topic?

Kobasa: I was introduced to the work of Dox Thrash (1893–1965) when I was a fellow at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which has an amazing collection of his work. As a printmaker with the Fine Print Workshop under the FAP in Philly, he helped develop an entirely new technique, the carborundum mezzotint. This example of creative experimentation generated by artists working alongside each other got me wondering about the kinds of exchange happening in other FAP print workshops across the country. I was delighted to discover that SLAM had work by him and a remarkably wide range of other WPA printmakers. 

Torbert: During the uncertain, worry-filled months of spring 2020, I wrote daily social media posts about works of American art in SLAM’s collection. My curiosity was piqued by a group of 39 bright paintings made by 26 children in classes at the LeMoyne Federal Art Center in Memphis, Tennessee, about whom very little was known beyond their names and ages. As I researched these artists, I learned about the impact that this early exposure to the arts had within many of their lives, whether or not they pursued art making as a profession. I started dreaming about an exhibition that could share not only this group of paintings and their artists’ stories but also place them within a larger context of government-sponsored arts education. 

What was new or unexpected about the curatorial process for developing this exhibition?

In developing an exhibition that seeks to highlight a particular part of the collection, as we did here, there are many, often difficult choices to be made. We started with a group of 256 paintings, prints, and drawings that had come to SLAM in 1943, and needed to select around 50 that could tell a story about the art of the WPA. Our very first task may sound like a simple one: we wanted to look at every work in person. Doing so reveals much information not available from pictures in a database, such as scale, condition, and the somewhat indefinable “wall power.” Early on, we knew that the significant intersection of art and education that shaped the FAP approach to supporting the arts would also inform our exhibition, so we invited two of our colleagues in the Museum’s education department, Kira Hegeman and Latausha Cox, to be part of that early looking process with us. Their perspectives as educators and artists helped us ask questions about how artists were approaching their work and what role they would play in an exhibition about the importance of supporting art making. 

How did you arrive at the organization of this exhibition?

The next stage of developing the exhibition involved us asking, “which stories do we want to prioritize, and how can we communicate them most clearly?” We weighed the pros and cons of centering the show, for example, on subject matter (landscapes, portraits, socially engaged topics, and more) or artistic techniques. We ultimately settled on geography as the exhibition’s driving theme and organizational framework, as it enabled us to highlight the specific circumstances under which each artist worked. Between 1935 and 1942, the FAP opened offices in all 48 states. The prints, drawings, and paintings featured in this exhibition were made in 11 cities across the country—Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Memphis, Milwaukee, New Orleans, New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, DC—and will be displayed in groupings by cities. Juxtaposing works of art made in geographical proximity but sometimes disparate circumstances allows us to ask if the artworks have a collective character distinct to their place of production. For which audiences and what purposes was art made? And what does it look like to picture a nation through the eyes of artists working across its breadth? 

This exhibition features many artists who will probably be new to visitors. Whom should they seek out?

Kobasa: There’s a lithograph by Zama Vanessa Helder (1904–1968) that evokes the incredible peacefulness I’ve often found walking through cemeteries. She balances the rippling darkness of the shadows with a landscape that is composed as much of the cream of the paper as anything else. Helder had a very active career as an artist and teacher; she trained in New York and worked in Seattle and Spokane. She was incredibly accomplished as a watercolor artist who painted landscapes. I loved coming across a photo of her accompanied by her pet skunk, Sniffy, whom she featured in another lithograph. 

Torbert: I think the artist I would most want to meet in person would be Selma Day (1907–1994). Born and raised in New York City, she studied art at Brooklyn College, the Art Students League, and Columbia University. A member of Harlem artistic circles in the 1930s, she painted murals of scenes from Mother Goose rhymes on the walls of the children’s ward at Harlem Hospital, as part of the first major commission the FAP awarded to African American artists. Day later worked as a commercial artist in advertising, followed by careers in marketing and interior design. She frequently appeared in newspapers’ social pages, which commented on her wit and sparkling personality. As Jet magazine reported in 1957: “When a careless guest dropped a lighted match and set fire to the dress of New York interior decorator Selma Day, she shrugged: ‘Who says I’m not a hot number?’ ”