Brave New Deal

When Emalie Boyce was appointed Director of the Louisiana Division of Administrative Law, the bare walls of the agency’s Florida Street courthouses didn’t sit well with a lifelong art lover. The Division of Administrative Law exists to adjudicate disputes between government agencies and those they regulate, and Boyce reasoned that, since the people coming through its courtrooms are often facing very difficult situations, it would be nice if they had something more inspiring to look at than some mass-produced motivational posters about dignity and respect. In the absence of a decoration budget, Boyce contacted LSU School of Art Director Rod Parker with a proposition: challenge LSU art students to come up with poster designs celebrating aspects of Louisiana culture, in the style of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Arts Project. Established in 1935 by President Roosevelt, the WPA’s Federal Arts Project created more than one hundred community art centers around the country and employed more than five thousand artists, who in turn contributed a significant body of public art, much of which can still be seen around the country today. Resulting works would be assessed by the administrative law judges, and the winners hung in the DAL’s courtrooms. Parker liked the idea. He connected Boyce with School of Art Associate Professor Courtney Barr, and Instructor Luisa Restrepo-Perez, and a new kind of New Deal was born. 

Twenty-two graphic design majors from two LSU School of Art classes took part, conceiving poster designs that promote Louisiana in the distinctive style of WPA Federal Arts Project artworks. It’s an illustrative style that reflects the interest in Italian Renaissance fresco art that was influencing American regionalism in the 1920s and ’30s, and tended to include stylized depictions of hard-working men and women surrounded by the bountiful fields, construction projects; and planes, trains, and automobiles of progress that are the common currency of much Depression-era social realist art.

“I wanted to make sure that I put a little bit of me into the project,” he said. “I got to thinking about the Hotel Ponder—this super-old building that is beautiful, but essentially abandoned. Our town grew up around the railroad and the Hotel Ponder became a big stopping point for politicians moving from town to town ... for me, born and raised here, I look at it as an important piece of the story of how we developed.”

After researching examples of Federal Arts Project work, students created designs celebrating Louisiana harvest celebrations, Gulf fishing, crawfish season, Cajun music, raised cemeteries, LSU sports; and architectural landmarks such as Shreveport’s Strand Theatre, Ardoyne Plantation, and Amite’s Hotel Ponder. They were encouraged not only to consider the subject matter and style of the original WPA works, but also the printmaking technology available in the nineteen-thirties, which restricted WPA-era artists’ choices where colors and complex imagery were concerned. According to Barr, who advised participating students from her Digital Imaging Technique class, participants were also asked to think about where their work would be hung and who would be seeing it, and encouraged to focus on subjects that might elicit a sense of pride in, and appreciation of, one’s surroundings—a reprieve from difficult things. 

Most, although not all, of the students who took part were Louisiana natives, and found that the poster project was an opportunity to reflect upon what makes Louisiana “home” to them. In her piece “Trolley,” Grace Carruth-Taylor, a graphic design major born in New Orleans but raised mostly in Baton Rouge, depicted a New Orleans streetcar. She explained that her elementary school—St. Andrews Episcopal on Carrollton Avenue—had a program where the fourth graders would take the kindergartners to ride up and down the streetcar line while they helped the little kids learn to read. “I was on both ends of that, as a kindergartner and a fourth-grader,” she said.

[Read this: John Lawson creates collage portraits of iconic Baton Rouge bluesmen]

In his poster, Amite native Dakota Baños focused on the once-important, now-derelict Hotel Ponder.  “I wanted to make sure that I put a little bit of me into the project,” he said. “I got to thinking about the Hotel Ponder—this super-old building that is beautiful, but essentially abandoned. Our town grew up around the railroad and the Hotel Ponder became a big stopping point for politicians moving from town to town. It became the place for the bigwigs to stop and take the night off. Eventually it ended up embroiled in scandal, but for me, born and raised here, I look at it as an important piece of the story of how we developed.” Looking to WPA-era posters promoting citiscapes of New York and Chicago for guidance, Baños channeled the New Deal style in the simplified lines of his Hotel Ponder, and the railroad tracks running through his poster’s foreground—symbols of modernity and progress that remain as evocative today as they did to Depression-era artists working on their WPA projects almost one hundred years ago. 

At the contest’s conclusion, twenty-two LSU School of Art students presented their poster designs to a panel of DAL judges—“a rare opportunity for our administrative law judges to choose multiple winners,” director Boyce noted wryly. Carruth-Taylor’s “Trolley” and Baños’s “Hotel Ponder” were among the seven designs chosen. They will be installed in the courtrooms of the Division of Administrative Law, reminding all who encounter them that today, just as during the deepest years of the Great Depression, art retains the power to make us see our world more clearly, and to find comfort and inspiration in what we find reflected there.