Exhibition of art produced by the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project during the Great Depression, showcasing the programme's impact on American art.
Art in Every Corner: The Works Progress Administration (1935-1943) is on at The Blanton Museum of Art from May 2 through September 27, 2026. It's a look at the art produced by the Federal Art Project, the arm of the Works Progress Administration that hired around ten thousand artists during the Great Depression to create paintings, drawings, prints, photographs and murals for public buildings and traveling exhibitions.
When the WPA closed in 1943, those works were distributed to institutions across the country, and the Blanton is one of them. The exhibition brings together pieces from that collection to show the program's reach—artists depicting every aspect of American life during a hard decade. It's framed by Franklin Roosevelt's 1938 goal to bring "some real paintings and prints and etchings and some real music" to people in out-of-the-way places, which sums up the whole project: paying artists to work and putting that work where people could actually see it.
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If you're not familiar with the museum, the Blanton is part of The University of Texas at Austin. Founded in 1963, it holds the largest public collection in Central Texas—more than 21,000 objects—and is home to Austin by Ellsworth Kelly. This show is a good way to see a specific slice of that collection, pulled from the WPA's New Deal years. It runs through September 27, so you've got plenty of time to catch it.
