Ann Prentice Wagner will tell the story of the federal projects that saw American artists and art lovers through the Great Depression of the 1930s. After the inauguration of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933, the new administration rushed to create projects to restore the failing economy and provide paying work to save millions of unemployed Americans and their families from starvation. Officials asked whether fine artists would be considered workers whose livelihoods should be saved. An experimental program, the Public Works of Art Project, began in December 1933 to see whether a national program to ornament public buildings could be practical. The PWAP was a success from coast to coast. Larger federal art programs followed, including the Treasury Relief Art Project, the Federal Art Project (later known as the Works Progress Administration), and the Treasury Section of Painting and Sculpture. Dr. Wagner will illustrate some of the most outstanding murals, paintings, sculptures, prints, and craft works created through the New Deal arts programs. As she will discuss, the New Deal saved a generation of artists who might otherwise have had to abandon their art. These art works helped to buoy American spirits through some of our country’s most difficult years.

Ann Prentice Wagner is Director of Bradbury Art Museum, a museum of contemporary art at Arkansas State University in Jonesboro. Dr. Wagner was previously the Jackye and Curtis Finch, Jr., Curator of Drawings at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts in Little Rock. She has also curated at the Washington County Museum of Fine Arts in Hagerstown, Maryland, and at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. After earning her PhD in Art History at the University of Maryland, Dr. Wagner took on several projects for the Smithsonian American Art Museum, including the 2009 exhibition and book 1934: A New Deal for Artists. Her research for this show on the Public Works of Art Project has led Dr. Wagner to a deep interest in the topic of today’s presentation, the New Deal art projects mounted by the Franklin Roosevelt administration during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Without these federal art projects, the United States might have lost a great generation of artists, and Americans might have lost their will to go on.

Why was Danish modern furniture so popular, and why does it remain so? How did Scandinavian immigrants to the United States in the 1920s shape American design culture in the 1950s? Did IKEA invent flat-pack, DIY furniture? Bobbye Tigerman will share thoughts about these questions and more in a conversation about her recent exhibition Scandinavian Design and the United States, co-organized with past ADAF speaker Monica Obniski. The exhibition examines the design exchanges between the United States and the Nordic countries of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden over the 20th century and includes a wide range of design media, from iconic Dansk kitchenware to a Volvo.

Bobbye Tigerman is a curator of design, craft, and architecture and has served as the Marilyn B. and Calvin B. Gross Curator, Decorative Arts and Design at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) since 2006. Her mission is to connect with museum audiences by communicating the relevance of design and craft to everyday life and to provide a platform to underrepresented designers. Her exhibitions include Scandinavian Design and the United States (2022), Beyond Bling: Jewelry from the Lois Boardman Collection (2016), California Design, 1930-1965: Living in a Modern Way (2011), and From the Spoon to the City: Design by Architects from LACMA's Collection (2009). She has earned degrees from Harvard University, the Courtauld Institute of Art, and the University of Delaware/Winterthur Program in Early American Culture. She is currently working on the inaugural installation of the David Geffen Galleries for LACMA’s permanent collection, scheduled to open in April 2026.