From the moment its doors opened in 1908 until our own time, Beauport – the Massachusetts home of renowned collector and decorator Henry Davis Sleeper – has been hailed as a landmark achievement in American interior design. It is also one of the greatest love letters ever composed. During its quarter-century of construction, the house mushroomed from seventeen to forty-five rooms, each more dazzling and inventive than the last – and all created to charm the love of Sleeper’s life, his charismatic neighbor on Gloucester’s Eastern Point, Piatt Andrew. Andrew’s own home, Red Roof, attracted an admiring circle that included collector Isabella Stewart Gardner, painter Cecilia Beaux, and even a youthful Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Among those in Andrew’s orbit, however, none was more devoted than Sleeper – who once declared to his neighbor, “Beauport would not have existed but for you.” Join author Tripp Evans for an exploration of the intertwined lives of these two men, whose homes’ seductive power remains palpable nearly a century after their owners’ deaths.

Ann Prentice Wagner will tell the story of the federal projects that saw American artists and art lovers through the Great Depression of the 1930s. After the inauguration of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933, the new administration rushed to create projects to restore the failing economy and provide paying work to save millions of unemployed Americans and their families from starvation. Officials asked whether fine artists would be considered workers whose livelihoods should be saved. An experimental program, the Public Works of Art Project, began in December 1933 to see whether a national program to ornament public buildings could be practical. The PWAP was a success from coast to coast. Larger federal art programs followed, including the Treasury Relief Art Project, the Federal Art Project (later known as the Works Progress Administration), and the Treasury Section of Painting and Sculpture. Dr. Wagner will illustrate some of the most outstanding murals, paintings, sculptures, prints, and craft works created through the New Deal arts programs. As she will discuss, the New Deal saved a generation of artists who might otherwise have had to abandon their art. These art works helped to buoy American spirits through some of our country’s most difficult years.

Ann Prentice Wagner is Director of Bradbury Art Museum, a museum of contemporary art at Arkansas State University in Jonesboro. Dr. Wagner was previously the Jackye and Curtis Finch, Jr., Curator of Drawings at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts in Little Rock. She has also curated at the Washington County Museum of Fine Arts in Hagerstown, Maryland, and at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. After earning her PhD in Art History at the University of Maryland, Dr. Wagner took on several projects for the Smithsonian American Art Museum, including the 2009 exhibition and book 1934: A New Deal for Artists. Her research for this show on the Public Works of Art Project has led Dr. Wagner to a deep interest in the topic of today’s presentation, the New Deal art projects mounted by the Franklin Roosevelt administration during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Without these federal art projects, the United States might have lost a great generation of artists, and Americans might have lost their will to go on.