Ben Shahn - Work During The Great Depression

Work During The Great Depression

Shahn's subsequent series of California labor leader Tom Mooney won him the recognition of Diego Rivera. In May and June 1933, he served as an assistant to Diego Rivera while Rivera executed the infamous Rockefeller Center mural. Shahn had a role in fanning the controversy, by circulating a petition among the workers. Also during this period, Shahn met photojournalist Bernarda Bryson, who would later become his second wife. Although this marriage was successful, the mural, his 1934 project for the Public Works of Art Projects and proposal for the Municipal Art Commission were all failures. Fortunately, in 1935, Shahn was recommended by Walker Evans, a friend and former roommate, to Roy Stryker to join the photographic group at the Farm Security Administration (FSA). As a member of the FSA group, Shahn roamed and documented the American south together with his colleagues Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange. Like his earlier photography of New York City, Shahn’s FSA work can be viewed as social-documentary. Similarly, Shahn’s New Deal art for the FSA and Resettlement Agency exposed American living and working conditions. He also worked for these agencies as a graphic artist and painter. Shahn’s fresco mural for the community center of Jersey Homesteads is among his most famous works, but the government also hired Shahn to execute the Bronx Central Annex Post Office and Social Security murals. In 1939, Shahn and his wife produced a set of 13 murals inspired by Walt Whitman's poem I See America Working and installed at the United States Post Office-Bronx Central Annex. Curator Susan Edwards recognizes the influence of this art on the public consciousness, writing, "The Roosevelt administration believed images were useful for persuading not only voters but members of Congress to support federal relief and recovery programs… The art he made for the federal government affirms both his own legacy and that of the New Deal."