Essay: The Harlem Community Art Center, by Gwendolyn Bennett

Essay: The Harlem Community Art Center, by Gwendolyn Bennett

Community Art Centers
Harlem Art Workshop
Harlem, New York
New York City

This essay was originally written for a proposed report to Congress on the value of the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project (WPA/FAP). The proposed report, to be called "Art for the Millions," was never published and these essays by WPA/FAP artists and administrators went unnoticed until rediscovered.

Bennett, Gwendolyn

Directed the Harlem Community Art Center, from 1937-1942

Report to Congress on the value of the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project (WPA/FAP).

The Federal Art Project

Essay by Gwendolyn Bennett published in Art for the Millions: Essays from the 1930's by Artists and Administrators of the WPA Federal Art Project, by Francis V. O'Connor, by published by: Greenwich, Conn. : New York Graphic Society, 1969-1974.

1930s

Rediscovered by art historian Francis V. O'Connor

The original manuscript is now in the file "Federal Support for the Visual Arts: The New Deal and Now" at the Library of the National Collection of Fine Arts of the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, D.C.

Essay retrieved from the private papers of WPA/FAP Director Holger Cahill.

Text document

English

Article, Essay

Federal Art Project Documents

The original manuscript is now in the file "Federal Support for the Visual Arts: The New Deal and Now" at the Library of the National Collection of Fine Arts of the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, D.C.

"In January, 1938, when I became acting director of the Center, and later when I was made the director, I found that I had brought to the task a whole set of ideals and ideas born in the minds of many people and deriving from many sources. So impelling were these ideals and so important was the work at hand that individuals willingly identified themselves with the collective will of the many."

--Gwendolyn Bennett

Text