WPA FEDERAL ARTS PROJECT POSTER
Fairmount Park Philadelphia. Circa 1938
Fairmount Park was developed in the nineteenth century to protect Philadelphia’s public water supply and to preserve extensive green spaces within a rapidly industrializing cityscape. It became one of the largest urban riparian parks in the United States and comprises the largest contiguous components of Philadelphia’s public park system.
“Fairmount” is the prominent hill located on the east bank of the Schuylkill River just north of the original boundary of Philadelphia. It was named by William Penn (1644-1718) when he claimed it as part of his Springettsbury manor. During the eighteenth century, the Schuylkill district was celebrated for the rural estates and elegant villas that lined the riverbanks west of the evolving city. In 1812, Philadelphia City Council’s watering committee purchased Fairmount for a new Development of the park began in the 1820s, when gardens and walkways were laid out. In 1876, more than 10 million people journeyed to Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park for the nation’s Centennial Exposition.
Among noteworthy cultural institutions within Fairmount Park are the Philadelphia Zoo, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Please Touch Museum, the Horticulture Center, and the Shofuso Japanese House and Garden as well as historic houses and industrial sites such as Mount Pleasant, Woodford, and Strawberry Mansion, and the Fairmount Waterworks. Boathouse Row, on the east bank of the Schuylkill, is an international center for competitive rowing.
The poster is part of the body of work created by the Federal Arts Project in Pennsylvania, a branch of the Works Progress Administration, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's massive work-relief effort to combat unemployment during the Great Depression. The Federal Arts Project employed artists to create murals, sculptures, paintings, and posters.
In its peak years, 1936 to 1938, the Federal Arts Project employed 5,000 artists across the country, at a salary of $95 a month. They created murals, sculptures and paintings, taught community art classes to millions, and produced 2 million posters from 35,000 designs at a cost of about a dime each. A small fraction of the posters remain today.
The original archival image was provided to Buffalo River Co courtesy of The Free Library of Philadelphia. Our digital archivist has lightly restored and enhanced the images in preparation for printing your Giclee print order. We print the entire image as it was created many years ago. That means we also reproduce the artworks aged patina, subtle imperfections, and signs of aging.
Our Giclee prints are created to look like the original, as if you wandered into a vintage store and saw it hanging on the wall with an aged patina that only the vestige of time can impart … so that their timeless essence is evoked for display in your home, office, mountain cabin, or lake house.
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