The first message from @NewDealMurals, an account on the social-media site formerly known as Twitter, came on January 10, 2025. It showed an image of a mural painted at a post office in Lake Worth, Florida, by Joseph D. Myers, who earned a $1,000 prize upon winning the commission. The mural, which Myers finished in 1947, is titled Settler Fighting Alligator in Rowboat.
Rendered in the lush social-realism sensibility of the Works Progress Administration—which gave employment to thousands of writers and artists throughout the Great Depression—it shows two men in a boat beating back an alligator, one with a stick and the other with a rifle. A hound perched on the boat’s stern bares its teeth at the gator, perhaps somewhat ill-advisedly. It is not a fair contest, after all. American life rarely is.
Since that first online missive, the account has amassed more than 5,000 followers by consistently doing the one thing it promised to do: sharing images of the public art commissioned by President Franklin D. Roosevelt through the W.P.A. and the Federal Works Agency, of which the W.P.A. became a part in 1939. These and other programs employed thousands of writers, artists, architects, and historians to record folk music, write guidebooks, and evoke civic grandeur with the buildings they erected.
W.P.A. artists painted close to 4,500 murals, according to the Web site Living New Deal. Many of these show a nation in the process of becoming itself through westward expansion, agriculture, and industrialization. There are scenes of Native American history (Indian Harvest, by Richard Olsen, Sigourney, Iowa, U.S. Post Office, 1940) and displays of the land’s natural bounty (Themes of the National Parks, by David McCosh, Udall Department of the Interior Building, Washington, D.C., 1940).
The account is one of my favorites on a site whose new Muskian name is too tacky to put into print. In a feed replete with dispiriting and disturbing news, New Deal Murals is like an escape hatch into a world filled with accessible beauty, a world where government worked and was celebrated for doing so. It was a time when public buildings aspired and inspired, a time before A.I. slop, a time when art mattered and artists were revered.
Which was exactly the point, according to the man who runs the account, Andrew Anderson, who is based in Memphis. In one of our two interviews, Anderson said he was intent on highlighting the precarious state of the U.S. Postal Service, where many of these murals are located.
“We’ve seen threats of privatizing, selling off for parts, destroying the Postal Service by the Trump administration recently,” he told me, “and the fate of the post offices and the murals inside them would be uncertain if this were to occur.”
On the whole, his project is a rebuke to government today, a message that is effective because it relies on historical works of art that could not possibly stand accused of trying to spread contemporary bias. Anderson never appends anything but a simple caption to his images. The murals speak for themselves, and they speak loudly.
At a time when Trump is tearing down the East Wing of the White House, musing about erecting an Arc de Triomphe (Arc de Trump?) on the banks of the Potomac River, and mandating that new federal buildings adhere to his preferred style of neoclassical and Baroque kitsch, New Deal Murals is a reminder that things weren’t always this grim when it came to national aesthetics. In fact, they were positively radiant, even during some of the country’s darkest times. Fancy that.
New Deal Murals is both nostalgic and subversive, recalling a version of America that is distant but perhaps not irretrievable. “The public pressure of needing to get people to work during the Depression—that doesn’t really exist anymore,” Anderson said. “The political circumstances don’t exist anymore for that to happen.” But that could always change.
Alexander Nazaryan is a Washington, D.C.–based writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal
