This year marks the 75th anniversary of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, a sequence of programs (1933-1938) devised to put Americans back to work during the Great Depression. The Federal programs built dams for power generation and irrigation, the interstate highway system, courthouses, and post offices, and were responsible for initiatives that shaped the infrastructure of mid-century American life. The Works Progress Administration (WPA), established in 1935, employed artists and artisans to create public works of art and furniture for many of the buildings that were constructed by the Federal government. The goals of the program are best expressed in the words of President Roosevelt, “...to create a more abundant life.” Roswell was one of 60 some communities across America that was selected to be the site of a WPA-funded art center, a locus for arts enrichment that opened in October 1937.

Our Beginnings: The WPA Legacy celebrates the 75th anniversary of the New Deal and presents many of the Museum’s WPA-era treasures. Included in the exhibition are some rare gems: a series of woodblocks carved by Manville Chapman to commemorate the opening of the Roswell Museum Federal Art Center; examples from E. Boyd’s Portfolio of Spanish Colonial Design—a pictorial testimony to the work of New Mexico’s santeros; and the Museum’s first work of art, a watercolor by Olive Rush titled Weird Land.

We truly have a rich legacy that surrounds the Roswell Museum and Art Center, and it is with this thought that we invite you, your family and friends to come and experience “…a more abundant life.” ….you never know who you will meet in the galleries of the Roswell Museum and Art Center.