AFA Autumn 2018

Antiques & Fine Art 127 2018 Crash to Creativity: The New Deal in Vermont , on view at the Bennington Museum, Bennington, Vermont (www.benningtonmuseum.org), through November 4, 2018, provides a window onto what it was like to live in Vermont during the Great Depression, and the role the New Deal had in shaping Vermont and helping to build the infrastructure that continues to benefit the state today. Jamie Franklin is curator at the Bennington Museum, Bennington, VT. 1. Richard C. Morrsion, “History of the Federal Art Projects in New England,” Federal Art in New England, 1933–1937 (Federal Art Project, 1937): 7. 2. John Spargo to Leroy Williams, 7 January 1938, Leroy Williams Papers (1968.237), Bennington Museum, Bennington, VT. 3. Wilson Ring, “Social Security rooted in Vermont history,” Burlington Free Press, originally published 30 Jan. 2015. 4. “The First Social Security Beneficiary,” Social Security History, https://www.ssa.gov/history/imf.html acc essed 20 June 2018. Joseph Stella (1877–1946), Skyscrapers, 1937. Oil on canvas, 36 x 30 inches. Collection of T. W. Wood Gallery, Montpelier, Vt. With its goal through the Works Progress Administration (WPA) of creating art that was for and accessible to the American people, the federal government distributed many of these works to public collections throughout the country. The T. W. Wood Gallery in Montpelier is Vermont’s official repository for federal New Deal art. The gallery received more than ninety WPA works of art on permanent loan in the late 1930s and 1940s. This collection includes an eclectic mix of works, ranging from masterpieces by Joseph Stella and Reginald Marsh, featuring classic New York City imagery, and Social Realist prints by Raphael Soyer and Will Barnet, to classic Vermont landscapes by Luigi Lucioni and Henr y Schnakenberg. Unfortunately, the reasons behind why specific works were selected to come to the Wood Gallery are unknown, but the collection remains to this day one of the important cultural legacies of the New Deal in Vermont.