This exhibition complements “Celebrating Heroes: American Mural Studies of the 1930s and 1940s from the Steven and Susan Hirsch Collection,” organized by the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College.

President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs included several designed to employ artists in a variety of fields, paying them to paint murals across the country. They made many of their best known murals for post offices, under the U.S. Treasury Department’s Section of Fine Arts. Murals were and are works of art people often encounter in their everyday lives, which makes it easy for them to spark controversy when times change. It also means they bring fine art into the public sphere, inspiring people to go about their day-to-day business.