Typically when I think of the work of the WPA during the Depression I think of either construction projects or manual busywork (digging a hole and filling it in). My colleague Laura Conaway (by the unusual absence of whose byline from this blog you may have already figured out is on vacation) sends a reminder that the WPA extended to culture and the arts. The mural above at the La Brea Tar Pits' Page Museum was produced in 1937 by artists participating in the WPA's Federal Art Project.
In one of those new Hoover Dam commercials with Rachel that msnbc has been running, she says, "You have to be a stronger country when you come out the other side of this recession than when you went in." Our Depression-era forebears apparently understood that culture and the arts are integral to that strength.