A good deal came out of the Great Depression.
The UNM Art Museum is marking the 75th anniversary of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal with "For the Greater Good: New Deal Art in New Mexico." It opened Tuesday.
The exhibit explores art from the 1930s, when Roosevelt implemented the New Deal, a sequence of programs to help people recover from the Great Depression.
"This is the 75th anniversary of the New Deal," said Chip Ware, curator of the show, "so we have to put up an exhibition that is dramatic and fairly comprehensive."
The New Deal introduced programs such as the Works Progress Administration, which employed artists to work on large projects.
The exhibit features photography, painting, wood carvings, etchings and a bedspread.
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While many of the paintings in the exhibit reflect the optimism of the New Deal, the photographs offer a glimpse into hard times.
Photographers such as John Collier documented life in the Southwest, showing destitute families trying to survive in a time of economic crisis. The woodcarvings show the Catholic and folk influences on the artists.
"The whole idea that artists were worth something and deserved to be paid like everybody else came to be an accepted idea - at least with the Democrats in Washington," Ware said.
Two New Mexico artists, Raymond Johnson and Willard Nash, benefited from the New Deal. They made a series of paintings. Johnson tried to paint the intellectual side of college life, with a bunch of abstract paintings titled after academic courses. He used bold colors and lines to represent academic disciplines.
Nash had a more concrete approach, painting the physical side of college life, with students swimming and playing volleyball and rugby. These series were meant to be shown together.
The idea for government-sponsored art came from outdoor murals in Mexico, Ware said.
Katherine Flynn, head of the National New Deal Preservation Association, said the U.S. government was right to encourage muralists.
"I don't know if they were strongly encouraged to paint work scenes, but it must have been hinted in there to give people hope again, the opportunity to work," she said. "All of the sudden, Joe Blow on the street got to see a real-life artist working."
UNM Instructor Beth Maloney said she looks forward to bringing her art education students to the exhibition.
"I am really excited about the pieces here," she said. "I think they will be really rich work for my students to use as they facilitate a visit."
