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Michigan Post Office Murals Project Credits
Project Director and writer: Michaela Rife Writers and site photographers: Madeleine Aquilina, Megan Flattley, and Rosa Glaessner Novak National Archives research: Dylan Volk
Website design: Julia Falkovitch-Khain
Funding for this project comes from the Sandra Olson Fund for Art History and Civic Engagement, Department of the History of Art, University of Michigan.
More New Deal Resources
Websites
The Living New Deal
The Living New Deal, hosted at the University of California, Berkeley, is the most exhaustive database and source for New Deal research with maps, bibliographies, timelines, projects listed by state and city, and more.
Photogrammar
The team at Photogrammar collected the 170,000 photographs taken under the New Deal Farm Security Administration (FSA) and the Office of War Information (OWI) programs and plotted them on interactive maps. You can search photographs by state, county, town, theme, and photographer.
Indians at the Post Office: Native Themes in New Deal-Era Murals
Indians at the Post Office is an extensive digital exhibition from the Smithsonian National Postal Museum in Washington, D.C. The site, which launched in 2014, includes thematic essays about murals made by and about Native artists, including “Encounter,” “Treaties,” “Legend,” and the “Myth of Extinction.” Indians at the Post Office also includes a map of the included murals.
New Deal Art Registry
Less extensive than the Living New Deal but with a focus on art, the New Deal Art Registry relies on users to submit images and data about New Deal art across the country. It also features an interactive map with photographs of each object.
Museums and Archives
National Archives
The primary records for New Deal murals in federal buildings in Michigan and nationwide are held at the National Archives facility in College Park, Maryland, in Record Group 121, “Section of Fine Arts: Case Files concerning Embellishments of Federal Buildings, 1934-1943.” Most of this material must be examined on-site but the National Archives have digitized photographs of the completed murals, which can be explored here.
The Library of Congress
The Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., has digitized many of their extensive Great Depression and New Deal collections, ranging from oral histories to WPA posters and even folk music.
The Smithsonian American Art Museum
Many of the Michigan Section muralists have work in the Smithsonian American Art Museum collection and the museum is a rich repository for national New Deal material. For those interested in post office murals, SAAM is particularly useful for their incredible range of post office mural studies.
Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
The Archives of American Art is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in New Deal art. Though based in Washington, D.C., many of their holdings are digitized including an incredible range of New Deal oral histories conducted in the 1960s. In 2021, their podcast, Articulated, produced four informative episodes on the New Deal.
University of Michigan Museum of Art
UMMA holds a number of New Deal artworks in its collection, such as prints made with WPA funds and several photographs by FSA photographers like Arthur Rothstein and Dorothea Lange. Some of the artists who created murals for the Section, like Carlos Lopez, also have work in the museum’s collection.
Books and Dissertations
- Cheryl Ann Chidester, “The documentation and preservation of art-in-architecture of Michigan: The section of fine arts projects,” (MS Thesis, Eastern Michigan University, 2007)
- Barbara Haskell, ed. Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925-1945, (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2020)
- Karal Ann Marling, Wall to Wall America: Post Office Murals in the Great Depression, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982)
- Richard D. McKinzie, The New Deal for Artists, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973)
- Barbara Melosh, Engendering Culture: Manhood and Womanhood in New Deal Public Art and Theater, (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991)
- Marlene Park and Gerland E. Markowitz, Democratic Vistas: Post Offices and Public Art in the New Deal, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984)
- Christine M. Nelson Ruby, “Art for the People: Art in Michigan Sponsored by the Treasury Section of Fine Arts, 1934-1943,” (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Michigan, 1986)
- A. Joan Saab, For the Millions: American Art and Culture Between the Wars, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004)