Kresge Art Museum WPA Walking Tour

Welcome to the Kresge Art Museum's Virtual Walking Tour of New Deal art and architecture in the Lansing, East Lansing area.

In the 1930s, the United States government, under the leadership of Franklin D. Roosevelt and his “New Deal” social program, emerged as a patron of the arts, assuring the survival of artists, improving public facilities and creating a public art audience. Countrywide, communities large and small, urban and rural, were recipients of this government-sponsored art.

The Kresge Art Museum created this website as a resource for the general public and educators to discover the numerous examples of art and architecture of East Lansing and Lansing from this period. This site offers both a virtual online tour as well as a walking tour in a pdf format to print out and take with you on a visit to the Michigan State University Campus. Factual information on individual artists and activity guides are offered, as well as useful links to additional WPA resources.

The walking tour of the Michigan State University campus takes approximately one hour and fifteen minutes. See the map later in this site for additional information.

History of the Works Progress Administration

Although all government art of the 1930s is often thought of as "WPA," the Works Progress Administration (1935 – 1942) was just one of the artist relief programs begun by the Roosevelt administration after the stock market crash of 1929. The Public Works Administration (PWA), active from 1933 to 1939, was responsible not only for large construction projects but also for supplementing the cost of many public buildings throughout the 1930s. In contrast, the WPA was more general, sponsoring "smaller useful projects," such as roads, sidewalks and parks, and requiring less skilled labor and less expense. Mural painting, sculpture, and public art education programs were run by the state-administered Federal Art Project (FAP), a WPA subsidiary in existence between 1935 and 1943.

Style of New Deal Art

As evidenced in the mid-Michigan area, government-sponsored buildings of the period are characteristically functional facilities such as post offices and hospitals. Although styles vary according to purpose, rectilinear forms and red brick walls with contrasting horizontal and vertical bands of light limestone generally dominate the buildings.

Reflecting the idealism and nationalism of the period, many of the buildings were decorated with bulky, angular free-standing sculpture, low-reliefs, and murals designed to be positive, educational statements. The government's insistence that the art should be immediately comprehensible to a broad audience assured a representational style with stylized renderings of objects and people. Artists tended to utilize contemporary subjects rather than borrow from the classical past or nineteenth-century allegorical traditions. Often the subjects related to local history and to former, more prosperous times. Art was to be uplifting, democratic and a part of people's lives.

Website revised in 2004 by Elizabeth DeRose and Kevin Henley, originally created by Thelma Rohrer.
Website design and photographs by Kevin Henley.