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Richard Walker: The New Deal's immense investment in infrastructure from 1933 to 1943 underwrote the expansion of the United States. the recovery from the Great Depression, the waging of World War Two, and it actually underwrote much of the post War Golden Age of American rapid growth and world dominance.
Ben Gillespie: Under a furrowed, tanned brow, a woman gazes over the photographer’s shoulders while two [00:00:30] children cling to hers, her fingertips curved above her jaw. “Migrant Mother,” the iconic 1936 photograph of the Great Depression taken by Dorothea Lange, captures a family that had left Cherokee territory to work the fields in central California.
This snapshot, funded by the New Deal, was one of nearly two hundred thousand taken by the Farm Security Administration photography project, which documented life during the 1930s.
Michelle Herman: The FSA was just a sliver of the New Deal whose sprawling [00:01:00] arts initiatives, reshaped American culture through murals sculptures, craft, literature, theater, and music.
Articulated, the new podcast from the Archives of American Art, explores this history through a four-part series that puts the voices of the New Deal in conversation with today's experts.
Kathy Vargas: The FSA photographers were some of the greatest teachers we ever had because they taught us how to see. They taught us what to see. [00:01:30] They taught us to see in a respectful and relevant way, and they put it at the service of a country that desperately needed them at that time.
Audrey McMahon: The artist matured on the job. The Unions matured on the job. I matured on the job. We all believed deeply in what we were doing. Certainly, I believed in it passionately, and I believe in it still, as passionately. [00:02:00]
Richard Walker: This was a necessary modernization of the fabric of the country for the 20th century.
Dorothea Lange: You speak of organization; I didn't find any. I found a little office, tucked away, in a hot, muggy, early summer, where Nobody especially knew exactly what [00:02:30] he was going to do or how he was going to do it.
Michelle Herman: Join us as we examine the new deal arts initiatives, how they changed the American landscape, and how their legacies continue today.
Gray Brechin: And so I would say that the triumph is just discovering rediscovering this lost civilization and trying to bring it back to show that it's not dead, it’s still alive. [00:03:00]
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