New Deal Sports & Recreation Art (10/10): "Basketball"

Above: "Basketball," a color lithograph by Joseph Vogel (1911-1995), created while he was in the WPA's Federal Art Project, ca. 1935-1939. Joseph Vogel felt that the federal government should have a strong role in the arts. In 1965, he said he wanted the government to be "a midwife, so to speak, in bringing art to the public," and he felt that the federal government should help improve America's unsightly, modern public spaces: "our cities are horrors... I don't mind government participation, government taking the lead, taking the initiative to responsibility. It is its responsibility... I traveled from here across a number of states and what I saw makes me believe that the public generally should have its eyes and ears protected from such sights of ugliness" ("Oral history interview with Joseph Vogel, 1965 Jan. 5," Smithsonian Archives of American Art). On the topic of our boring, modern public places, see my blog post, "The Reverse New Deal: Selling our public spaces, repressing our creativity, and transforming ourselves into low-paid corporate automatons for the 0.1%." Image courtesy of the General Services Administration and the University of Michigan Museum of Art.