Upcoming Events

Next ArtTalk
WPA Artists: Depression-Era Realism to Abstract Surrealism

Thursday, June 11th at 6pm Sharp

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the United States did something extraordinary: it put artists to work. This talk explores how artists captured the stories of everyday Americans, past and present, urban and country—and how their work helped shape a new vision and identity for the country.

Here in San Francisco, we have one of the earliest and finest examples of this legacy in the murals of Coit Tower. Drawing from newly arrived historic Salon collections by Ray and Miriam Rice, Basil Hawkins, Ben Messick, and Eugene Zaikine, we’ll trace this pivotal moment in American art—and follow how many of these artists later turned toward the avant-garde language of abstraction and surrealism in the postwar years.