Grand Canyon National Park Service Vintage Federal Art WPA Style Calendar Poster

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You are bidding on a beautiful vintage WPA National Parks poster. This poster is not a cheap reprint but rather a high quality print on thick paper stock taken directly from the SOLD OUT 2013 Calendar.Print measures 16 1/2" X 12 1/4"Ready to frame this print will add class and character to virtually any room in your house!I have several more of those beautiful prints so please take a look at my other listings. Will combine shipping on multiple orders.Between 1935 and 1943 the WPA's Federal Art Project printed over two million posters in 35,000 different designs to stir the public's imagination for education, theater, health, safety, and travel. Due to their fragile nature only two thousand posters have survived to this day; less than one tenth of one percent! Ranger Doug's Enterprises is the only source for faithful reproductions of WPA National Park serigraphed posters. Originally produced between 1938 and 1941, these sixteen stunning historical posters have been painstakingly restored, one screen at a time and are now offered as silkscreened prints. Due to the immediate popularity of reintroducing this unique art, many National Parks have commissioned Ranger Doug to continue this series with contemporary designs "in the style" the WPA. We now publish over 40 park posters and hope to complete the major National Parks before the NPS Centennial in 2016. HistoryAfter the stock market crash of 1929 and the subsequent economic depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt launched a massive bureaucratic structure called the New Deal whose primary goal was to put America back to work. Between 1935 and 1943, the WPA or Works Progress Administration (later changed to Work Projects Administration) was established by presidential order and employed more than 8 million workers. Seven percent of the WPA budget went for arts projects, producing 475,000 artworks through the Federal Writers' Project, the Federal Theatre Project, the Federal Music Project, and the Federal Art Project.The efforts of the Federal Art Project are mainly known today by the 4,000 public murals that survive on the walls of schools, hospitals, and other public buildings. Perhaps least known, by virtue of the fragile nature of paper and cardboard, are the more than 2,000,000 posters that were printed by the Federal Art Project's poster division. These posters were based on 35,000 designs, of which approximately 2,000 posters survive today. Sadly, nearly 33,000 poster designs have been lost forever, representing 99.9 percent of our public poster art.The early posters were individually hand-painted in one or two colors and were produced in very limited quantities. Poster subjects included art, theater, travel, education, health, and safety. Initially, about a third of the artists producing these posters resided in New York City; however, by 1938 the WPA/FAP poster divisions had spread to all 48 states, with the Chicago units producing as many as 1,500 posters per day--in up to eight colors--for as little as ten cents a poster. This prolific output was largely due to Anthony Velonis and his implementation of the silkscreen process.On August 26, 1938, the National Park Service poster program was launched by Dorr Yeager, assistant chief of the Museum Division of the Western Museum Laboratories in Berkeley, California, using WPA artists. In his letter to Frank Pinckley, Superintendent at Southwestern Monuments in Coolidge, Arizona, Yeager clearly adopted the improved silkscreen techniques of Anthony Velonis. Accompanying this letter were 10 poster designs, which included a preliminary sketch for Grand Teton National Park. In this letter Yeager stated:This poster for Grand Teton was made up more or less as an experiment and does not in any way represent the best which can be obtained by the process. Future posters, especially the lettering, will be of a much higher standard.This "Jenny Lake Museum" poster stands alone in its styling and lettering, harkening to earlier stylized WPA poster designs. From Yellowstone geyser (believed to be the second publication) onward, most posters featured the "Ranger Naturalist Service" banner at the top with more literal graphic interpretations of National Park scenes.WPA artist Chester Don Powell, pictured at left in the 1940 display "Posters for National Parks," was probably the chief designer of this "Ranger Natu- ralist" series. Only 14 National Park designs were produced, ending in 1941 with Bandelier National Monument. The number of posters printed of each design is unknown, but the fragility of silkscreens used at this time would have limited each edition to between 50 and 100 posters. Posters cost $12 per hundred or just twelve cents each. They were most likely produced and distributed to local Chambers of Commerce in communities surrounding each park to encourage visitation. At the close of publication in 1941, the remnants of this park collection were distributed back to the parks.For 35 years, they disappeared into history. Then, in 1973 a Grand Teton poster turned up destined for the park burn-pile. It was this poster that piqued the curiosity of seasonal park ranger Doug Leen, and a 20-year effort led him to Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, where 13 black-and-white negatives survived in the file drawers of the National Park Service archives. These negatives and the single poster, then the only one known to survive, were the templates used for reconstruction of this set.With the re-publication efforts underway, originals slowly began to emerge back into the public domain. It took another five years for two Mount Rainier posters to surface in a garage near Seattle, rescued in a similar fashion from under a park log cabin. A year later, another Mount Rainier poster turned up in an original frame. When taken apart to clean the glass, it was discovered that three posters were "sandwiched" together--the center one in pristine condition. These original colors were used for a limited edition for Mount Rainier's Centennial, celebrated in 1999, and the other two were donated back to the National Park Service.National Parks started searching their archive's flat files with Grand Canyon and Petrified Forest, finding originals stashed away. The Petrified Forest National Monument poster boasted a full nine colors! In 2003 Bandelier National Monument discovered 13 posters in a file drawer--some cut up and used as cardboard file dividers! In 2004 a Los Angeles art collector stumbled upon the largest single find: nine original park posters, which later sold at auction, the Grand Canyon poster bringing $9,000--the first test of value in a free market. And just last year a third Grand Teton poster surfaced as cardboard in a plant press in White Sands, New Mexico. Today, only 33 originals have been found and only one copy is known to exist for Yosemite, Zion, Lassen, Glacier, Fort Marion, and Petrified Forest. The three posters that remain unaccounted for are Wind Cave, Great Smoky Mountains, and Yellowstone Falls.Because only 14 parks subscribed to the Western Museum Laboratory's 1938 offer to produce posters, many parks today have commissioned contemporary images "in the style of" the WPA, the first in 1997 of Devils Tower. This was followed by Bryce Canyon, Mt. McKinley (now Denali), Olympic, Mesa Verde, Hawaii (now Hawaii Volcanoes), Rocky Mountain, and Sequoia. These designs are a collaborative effort by both Doug Leen and Brian Maebius with more park designs in progress. Recoloration of the reproductions has been formulated from analysis of the black-and-white photos as well as comparison with period art for each geographic area. read more

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