A little dose of U.S. history: During the 1930’s, under President Frankin D. Roosevelt, the Federal Art Project (a division of the WPA) commissioned the artistic community to paint murals in cities and towns throughout the country, “providing 5,000 jobs for artists and producing over 225,000 works of art for the American people.”

Many of the murals have long since been torn down or painted over, which I’m told is the fate of most in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Quite a few have survived, many of them in the historic towns along the Hudson River. When we went on our road trip upstate, I wanted to go on a walking tour to see seventeen of the WPA murals in the town of Poughkeepsie, but as luck would have it the tour guide was away that weekend. We were able to see a few murals at the Poughkeepsie post office and that’s where I saw this small but stately painting adorning the wall above the rows of p.o. boxes, Georgina Klitgaard’s View of Poughkeepsie in 1840. 

October 12th, 2007