Agenda - Parks and Recreation Commission - 01/09/2025

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& Markowitz 1992). The programs also served as an employment initiative. The government employed and commissioned over 10,000 artists and they produced thousands of pieces of quality artwork. These programs were a significant precedence for government involvement in the arts and are considered to be the largest federal public arts program in the history of the world(Cruikshank & Korza 1988; Cummings 1991). However, this scale of government involvement in public art was not without its critics. Many of the artists were considered `left wing' in their political views and drew criticism during the pre-World War II era for connections to communism. Congress, nervous of communism, began to criticize these programs, limit their resources, and ultimately bring about their end in "disillusion and despair" (O'Connor 1973, p. 28). Erica Doss (1995) describes two examples of the role of art in this period of rising political tension in America. First, in 1933, a mural commissioned for Rockefeller Center in New York by artist Diego Rivera was ordered destroyed, before it was even finished, because it included a giant portrait of Lenin. Likewise, artist Victor Arnautoff's depiction of left-wing newspapers (and their readers) in a San Francisco mural became a cause for political sensationalism and public political uproar. The 1960's ushered in a new era of federal support for public art programs. Unlike the 1930's the efforts in the 1960's launched a period of sustained subsidy of art by the federal government. Similar to the 1930's it was the desire for social change that propagated public art programs (Raven, 1989). Following World War II, modern aesthetic ideals were being featured in public art projects. These works were considered `pure art' and were decidedly non-utilitarian and non-allegorical, but somewhat obscure to the general public. Rosenberg (197 1)noted that, a professional interpreter was needed to explain "modern"works of art to the non-art audience. The elite nature of this type of public art made some question the value of public art that didn't 46