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:: In Their Own Words

In Their Own Words

Laura Harris Hapke, AM'69

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.

Posted March 14, 2008