During the New Deal, thousands of unemployed men and women found jobs painting workers onto Works Progress Administration (WPA) canvases. But did they identify with that army of working-class people who inhabited their 1930s art? What interconnections did their government-sponsored cultural production really have with the trade unions, strikes, protests, and despondent apple sellers of the Great Depression?
Labor's Canvas answers such question by employing both a labor- and an art-historical approach to the body language of class.