Print of 3 miners in blue shirts with blue hats, two with lights shining from hats.
Elizabeth Olds. "Miners." 1937. Courtesy of the Fine Arts Collection, U.S. General Services Administration, WPA, Federal Art Project, 1935-1943. On extended loan to the BMA.

An exhibition focused on the significant contributions of women printmakers of the Work Progress Admistration is coming to the Baltimore Museum of Art in November.

Opening on Nov. 5, the exhibit will feature 50 works drawn from the BMA’s holdings of nearly 1,000 prints made by the Work Progress Administration’s artists.

Ida Y. Abelman. "Child Labor." 1937. Courtesy of the Fine Arts Collection, U.S. General Services Administration, WPA, Federal Art Project, 1935-1943. On extended loan to the BMA.
Ida Y. Abelman. “Child Labor.” 1937. Courtesy of the Fine Arts Collection, U.S. General Services Administration, WPA, Federal Art Project, 1935-1943. On extended loan to the BMA.

The WPA was a New Deal agency that employed millions of unemployed Depression-era people — primarily men — to carry out public works projects, like building roads and public buildings. It was set up in May 1935 via presidential order by then-president Franklin D. Roosevelt.

In August 1935, the WPA’s Federal Art Project began offering employment to the millions of workers affected by the Great Depression, including artists. The BMA’s exhibition, entitled “Art/Work: Women Printmakers of the WPA” highlights the vast contributions of women printmakers, who “gave visual form to the fraught state of American society throughout the 1930s and early 1940s,” according to the museum’s press announcement.

The works chosen highlight the importance of women artists, who “captured the human faces of industrial and domestic labor—and its inherent racial, gendered, and class inequities—while they used their art to support important reforms led by the era’s growing communist and socialist movements.”

Margaret Lowengrund. "Loading Bricks." 1936. Courtesy of the Fine Arts Collection, U.S. General Services Administration, WPA, Federal Art Project, 1935-1943. On extended loan to the BMA.
Margaret Lowengrund. “Loading Bricks.” 1936. Courtesy of the Fine Arts Collection, U.S. General Services Administration, WPA, Federal Art Project, 1935-1943. On extended loan to the BMA.

The museum aims to link the economic, social, and environmental crises of the Depression era to those of today, underlining the critical relevance of these artworks to 21st-century issues.

An adjacent gallery will highlight how both male and female WPA artists used the printing press to decry fascism despite explicit governmental orders against it, including works about the Spanish Civil War (1936-39).

“For too long, the work of women has been unrecognized and swept under the rug. In this moment when the topic of invisible labor of women and others is receiving critical attention it deserves, I cannot think of a more apt exhibition to engage our audiences on this issue and its histories,” said Asma Naeem, the BMA’s Dorothy Wagner Wallis Director.

The “Art/Work: Women Printmakers of the WPA” exhibition will run from Nov. 5, 2023 through June 30, 2024.