courtesy Krannert Art Museum
Chet La More, 'Civilians,' ca. 1937. Allocated by the US Government, commissioned through the New Deal art projects.
Chet La More's 'Civilians,' 1937, was commissioned through the New Deal's art projects.
All but one of the 43 prints in Pressing Issues, the exhibit in the Chazen’s Garfield Gallery this fall, are black and white. Most have this stamp at the bottom: FEDERAL ART PROJECT NYC WPA.
These prints were made in the late 1930s and early 1940s, the only time the federal government funded artists with gusto. The Works Progress Administration, established by President Franklin Roosevelt as part of the New Deal, sent millions back to work during the Great Depression. Due to the urging of FDR’s childhood friend, George Biddle, artists got paid, too. Over the eight years of its existence, the Federal Art Project employed more than 10,000 sculptors, muralists, set designers, puppeteers and printers.
The 2026 Fall Arts Preview logo.
The artists associated with the WPA were mostly known for “bolstering people's spirits amid a very tumultuous time,” says Kathryn Koca Polite, curator at the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and curator of this show. But Koca Polite recalls “seeing artworks that were not celebratory, not joyous,” when she photographed the Krannert ’s collection, including the WPA lithographs decades ago. “They were really looking to the social injustices of their day.” This is the art she has collected for Pressing Issues.
The people depicted in these works are groaning or menacing, in despair, in pain or in terror, or they’re dead, or about to die. The only hint of a real smile is in Minetta Good’s Artist at Work.
At the entrance is Nan Lurie’s Technological Improvement, where workers line up for a gig, not seeing a sign around the corner that reads “No Help Wanted.” Those at the back of the line are getting sucked into the sky by giant mechanical claws; it looks like their souls are leaving their bodies. Koca Polite says some of the prints rely on “modernist visual tendencies” like Cubism and Expressionism. Some also tap into “Surrealist nightmarish fuel.”
Koca Polite hadn’t realized how prescient the show would be. But by the time Pressing Issues was first on view at the Krannert in October 2020, the pandemic was in full swing and a landmark presidential election loomed. Art on economic insecurity, workers’ rights, immigration, and the rise of fascism seemed fitting.
The show has since traveled to the Weisman Art Museum in the Twin Cities and the Rollins Museum of Art in Winter Park, Florida. The Chazen show, which runs Sept. 8-Dec. 13, includes six additional works owned by the museum. Four of them are by Carl G. Hill.
Carl G. Hill’s ‘Newsboy.’
Unsung artist Carl G. Hill’s ‘Newsboy.’
Hill isn’t a well-known artist; he was born in Trinidad & Tobago and died serving in the Merchant Marine in World War II. But in New York, he learned lithography from Riva Helfond, who’s also in this show. She taught at the Harlem Community Art Center, which was funded by the Federal Art Project.
In Hill’s Newsboy, a Black boy hawks newspapers with self-confidence. In Low Cotton, you can feel backs break as sharecroppers, still bound by Jim Crow, bend to pick cotton under the threat of violence. In Untitled (CIO), the initials for the Congress of Industrial Organizations — a home for unskilled workers, women and minorities — dance among men’s faces.
“The Chazen may have the most complete collection of works on paper, and a few paintings, by Carl G. Hill today,” says James Wehn, the Chazen’s curator of works on paper. That’s thanks to the late Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice David Prosser, who was known for, among other things, voting with the court majority to uphold Gov. Scott Walker’s anti-labor Act 10. Wehn says Prosser loved art, and “wanted to share that with others.” Prosser’s obituary says his “passion for the arts extended especially to prints.” Overall, he donated 122 works to the Chazen; 38 were works by Hill.
A sectioned-off corner, beyond a content warning, contains four works denouncing racial terror, and all four prints depict lynching. One of these works is the fourth Carl G. Hill piece: Lynching (U.S. Senate Anti-Lynch Bill), which Wehn describes as “a pointed critique of unveiled white supremacy within the United States government.”
The working-class artists in this exhibit showed the world as they saw it. Wehn is effusive: Lithographs, he says, are “essentially printed drawings, and these are really good drawings.”
