Federal Art Project offered opportunities to female artists

SLAM’s exhibition The Work of Art: The Federal Art Project, 1935–1943 features artworks by more than 50 artists, 13 of whom are female identifying, made during the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project.

The New Deal-era FAP helped to federally fund the visual arts in the United States from 1935 to 1943. Throughout its run, the FAP employed thousands of artists from all over the country, commissioning them to create works of different mediums and styles for public spaces and exhibitions. A nondiscrimination clause encouraged the FAP to hire artists of color as well as women, who were not often recognized in the art world at the time. Below are a select number of works featured in the exhibition by pioneering women of the FAP.

Miné Okubo

Miné Okubo was born and raised in Riverside, California, and received a master’s of fine arts from the University of California, Berkeley. After graduation she spent two years traveling Europe, studying under painter Fernand Léger while in Paris. Upon returning from Europe, Okubo was employed by the WPA from 1939 to 1942, working on several murals under commission by the Federal Art Project. During this time, she collaborated with Diego Rivera, who inspired many WPA muralists.  

In the Museum’s exhibition, Okubo’s The Musician, made in 1940 or 1941, is a vibrant, colorful screenprint that depicts the abstract form of a musician. Okubo used screenprint to great effect in this work, combining swathes of solid color with areas that resemble groups of individual marks. Okubo followed in the footsteps of many other American artists who increasingly experimented with models of abstraction in this period. Okubo’s skill with bold and graphic imagery would continue in later projects. 

Okubo’s tenure with the WPA came to an end in 1942, roughly five months after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and two months after President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, which led to the incarceration of more than 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II. Okubo and her brother were relocated to a Japanese American assembly center in Tanforan, which detained nearly 8,000 Japanese Americans, mostly from the Bay Area. After six months of confinement, they were moved to the Topaz concentration camp in Utah. During her time in the internment camps, Okubo recorded what she saw via her sketchbook. She was eventually released from confinement after Fortune magazine came across her work and offered her a job in New York. Okubo would later publish a graphic novel titled Citizen 13660 featuring over 200 drawings that detailed her time in the camps. It was the first published account of an internee’s experience. She continued to make art until her death in 2001. 

Zama Vanessa Helder

Zama Vanessa Helder, professionally known as Z. Vanessa Helder, was a nationally recognized watercolorist known for her depictions of Pacific Northwest scenery. Born in Lynden, Washington, Helder studied at the University of Washington and later at the Art Students League in New York. After finishing her studies in New York, she returned to Seattle, where she was employed by the FAP. In her early years with the FAP, she created many lithographs, including Here Lies, which is on view in the exhibition.  

Here Lies is a crayon lithograph that captures the quiet solemnity of a graveyard. The artwork centers around gravestones. Shadows stretch dramatically against the landscape, making the darkness heavier than the stones dotting the graveyard. The subtle precision and careful balance characterize much of Helder’s work in both print and watercolor. While this piece deviates from the scenic watercolors for which Helder is most known, it is indicative of her artistic prowess and reflective of her time spent with the FAP. 

She later became an educator and was appointed to a teaching position at the Spokane Art Center, a FAP-funded art center. A colleague and fellow FAP artist, Robert Engard described her as “an exceptionally fine instructor in this respect; she developed enthusiasm of the students in the subject.” Helder’s time with the FAP ended when the program disbanded in 1942, but she continued to work as an artist until her ailing health and limited exhibition opportunities eventually brought her career to end. Helder died in 1968.

Ida Abelman

Ida Abelman was born and raised in New York City, the daughter of Russian and Polish Jewish immigrant parents. Abelman’s work included many mediums including printmaking, murals, easel painting, and graphic work. She traveled throughout the Midwest working for the FAP, including in Sioux City, Iowa, where she taught and gave lectures on printmaking. She also painted murals in Iowa and Indiana.  

Abelman’s work covered a range of subjects but most often dealt with themes relating to the experience of immigration, poverty, and class-related strife in America. Much of her art was associated with the social realist movement that was popular among many other FAP artists. Her deeply political work highlighted the experiences of the urban poor, which was how Abelman described herself. She was inspired by her immigrant father’s experiences and portrayed these subjects in her work as well as the poverty and daily struggles of New Yorkers.  

Via Northwestern, on view in The Work of Art, is an abstract crayon and tusche lithograph that pays homage to Abelman’s journey from New York City to Sioux City, Iowa, via the North Western Railroad.  

Abelman moved to Sag Harbor, Long Island, New York, with her husband and two children at age 34. She exhibited her artwork locally and lived there until her death in 2002.

Beatrice Mandelman

Beatrice Mandelman was born in Newark, New Jersey, to Jewish immigrant parents. She was employed by the WPA’s Federal Art Project from 1936 to 1942, first working as a muralist and later as a printmaker. Around 1937 or 1938, Mandelman joined the Graphic Art Division of the FAP. Here she had the opportunity to work in the Silk Screen Unit, which allowed her to experiment with fine art serigraphy. Not long after, she was sent by the WPA to Butte, Montana, to work in the FAP-supported community art center teaching art to children and adults. She returned to New York a few months later to continue her work with the Graphic Art Division.  

In Mandelman’s Timbering, two men work underground on the dangerous yet essential task of timbering or constructing and reinforcing a mine’s wooden tunnels. The subject matter of this print recalls the months she spent in 1938 teaching at the community art center in the mining community of Butte. Like many other FAP artists, Mandelman painted the world around her and used her personal experiences as inspiration for her work. 

Her time with the FAP ended in 1942 when the project disbanded, and shortly thereafter, Mandelman and her husband moved to Taos, New Mexico, associating themselves with the Taos Moderns artists’ colony. It’s believed that art wasn’t her only motivator for leaving New York for New Mexico, according to an artsy.net editorial on the artist. Government documents show that just a few weeks after Mandelman and her husband left New York City, their apartment was searched by FBI agents. The FBI’s interest in the couple can be attributed to their leftist political beliefs and involvement, which is a recurring theme in much of Mandelman’s work. She continued to create art and reside in Taos for the remainder of her life, until her death in 1998.