60 Great Wpa Posters PDF Download

This dissertation focuses on posters produced by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a federal relief program designed to create jobs in the United States during the Great Depression. Between 1935 and 1943, the WPA established poster divisions in more than seventeen states and printed over two million posters from thirty-five thousand designs. These posters, which were commissioned by government agencies to promote various social programs and services, engaged some of the most pressing concerns of Americans during the New Deal. My project is organized thematically and concentrates on several issues addressed repeatedly in the roughly 2200 extant WPA posters: recreation and leisure, conservation, health and disease, and public housing. As I argue, these posters promote knowledge and social literacy as solutions to these and other social concerns. Moreover, they were sites of negotiation in which knowledge and literacy were regularly re-envisioned, both formally and conceptually, in the process of encouraging social reform. As a result, the posters legitimized various forms of knowledge and ways of knowing in translating the government's complex political and social goals into simple, legible forms that would capture the viewer's attention and mobilize Americans. They also engaged multiple and occasionally competing discourses - social, economic, political, and artistic. This approach positioned knowledge and social literacy at the center of the government's efforts to define and manage the relationship between self and society in modern America. It also promoted physical and social ideals that would have resonated in complex ways with the posters' diverse viewing public, working both for and against the rhetoric of consensus employed by New Deal agencies.