George Kennedy, When Art Worked

The concept of artistic citizenship (22)

The legacy of the settlement movement (See this entry on Louise Brigham)

The debate about necessity - funding buildings vs. funding people

Art and the function of documentation

The conservation movement

Preserving the artistic past

The elevation of the art of Native Americans

Competition between different agencies - Treasury, Interior, and Commerce

The debate about how work would be evaluated

American regionalism - post office murals

Artistic freedom and interesting commissions - attractive even to artists not needing relief (35)

The concept of the pursuit of happiness (38-39)

Archeological work - the Mound People

Avoiding symbolic or allegorical official art (47)

Victoria Grieve, The Federal Art Project and the Creation of Middlebrow Culture

Importance of Dewey's progressive cultural theory

Marketing folk art as fine art (163)

The Post-WWII legacy - political art under Stalin and Hitler as discrediting (164)

Anxieties about judgment, political party loyalty, and the privileging of unionization (167)

The Federal Art Project as not necessarily hostile to abstraction (173)

Arguments against middlebrow culture

William Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America

Role of the professionalization of social work (93)

Roosevelt and the "documentary imagination" (94)

Use of particulars in fireside chats (96)

Radicals who criticized documentary ethos of Roosevelt (99) - preference for abstract, systemic analysis

WPA "monuments" all around us (102)

America awakening to itself as a culture (103)

Creation of mass audience for art (104)

Privileging Federal Theatre

WPA guides to local communities (112)