Showing posts with label Works Progress Administration. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Works Progress Administration. Show all posts
Labor back in the day
On this Labor Day in the United States, we pause to contemplate the positions assigned women in the days of the Great Depression (the closer to "household arts" the better). All are posters commissioned by the Works Progress Administration:
On September 23
On this day in ...... 1899 (110 years ago today), a daughter was born in Kiev, then part of Russia (now Ukraine), to a mother "who was a freethinker" and a father who "advocated equal rights for women." Within years the father, who worked in the lumber and building industry, left his family for the United States. His daughter "felt deserted by her father's departure and was so traumatized that she stopped talking for six months." The family joined him 1904 and lived comfortably in Maine. Marrying a New Yorker soon after high school, the daughter, known by her married name of Louise Nevelson (above left), studied art and gave birth to a son. After she and her husband separated in the 1930s, Nevelson, who was Jewish, moved to Munich, Germany. There she studied art until the Nazis closed the school.
Returning to the United States, she taught art at a program funded by the Works Progress Administration and began showing and selling some of her sculptures. She won acclaim for her abstract expressionist pieces (right), some of which evoked the Holocaust. "A pioneering grand dame of the art world," Nevelson died in New York in 1988, a few months shy of her 90th birthday.(credit for photos)
Memorial Day
As in years past, IntLawGrrls marks this day of remembrance with images of Memorial Day. These may provoke thought about the use of female images in representations of this woman-started holiday.
On April 13
On this day in ...... 1909 (100 years ago today), Eudora Welty (right) was born in Jackson, Mississippi, to a mother who was a schoolteacher and a father who was an insurance executive. (photo credit) After studying in Mississippi, Wisconsin, and New York, she returned home when her father died in 1931. There her writing career began, initially as a society writer, then as a writer and photographer for the Works Progress Administration, and eventually as a writer of fiction. She traveled to France, Italy, England and Ireland in the late 1940s; and "held extended residences at a number of universities, including Oxford and Cambridge (she was the first woman to enter Peterhouse College)." A bibliography of the works that earned her the title "First Lady of Southern Literature" is here. Events in honor of Welty's centenary (she died in 2001) are detailed here.
... 1534 (475 years ago today), Sir Thomas More refused to swear an oath endorsing a new statute declaring the marriage of King Henry VIII and his 1st wife, Catherine of Aragon, void, and for this refusal Moore was put in prison. The dispute, in which More, a Catholic, was seen as an obstacle to Protestantism and to the legitimacy of Henry's 1533 divorce from Catherine and marriage to Anne Boleyn, ended a year later with More's beheading. (portrait credit) The matter was depicted in a mid-20th C. production, A Man for All Seasons.(Prior April 13 posts are here and here.)
A Happy New Year ... of reading
All of us at IntLawGrrls look forward to your visits this New Year!
(credit for 1941 Works Progress Administration poster)
Christmases past
This holiday season brings great hope for good change. Hopes are tempered, however by the reality of grave economic plight. Amid reports on plans for massive U.S. economic stimulus in the New Year, perhaps it will bring comfort to ponder seasons past, when government investment in America's cultural infrastructure, by means of the Works Progress Administration, helped bring joy to job-starved communities.
These images, both of WPA theater posters circa 1936-41, appear at IntLawGrrls courtesy of a favorite site, the American Memory Project of the Library of Congress.
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