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The Great Depression was a terrible blow for the Bay Area's thriving art community. A few private art projects kept a small number of sculptors working, but for the majority, prospects of finding new commissions were grim. By the mid-1930s, Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal program had gathered steam, and assistance was provided to the nation's art community. Salvation came from the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which employed thousands of artists to produce sculpture for public venues. The Bay Area art community subsequently benefitted from the need to fill the then-forthcoming Golden Gate International Exposition (GGIE) with sculpture of all shapes and sizes. As bad as the Depression was, its legacy more than 80 years on is one of beauty. The Bay Area is dotted with sculpture from this era, the majority of it on public display. Depression-Era Sculpture of the Bay Area is a visual tour of this artistic bounty.
About the author
Authors Nicholas A. Veronico and Betty S. Veronico have extensively researched art produced by the various programs of the WPA. Nicholas is an award-winning author and historian, having written or coauthored more than 40 books on local history, military, and transportation subjects, including Arcadia Publishing's Depression-Era Murals of the Bay Area. His interest in Depression-era art began during middle school, where he was greeted each morning by Olinka Hrdy's WPA Federal Art Project mural Deep Sea Magic. Betty is a senior commercial property manager on the San Francisco Peninsula and has written or coauthored six books. She is widely recognized for Lighthouses of the Bay Area (Arcadia Publishing, 2008), which details the lighted sentinels on the approaches to and inside the San Francisco Bay.
