Mail Tribune - March 2000 cont.In 1937, after a big battle with the relief bureaucracy, which wanted her to train as a cook, she won a coveted slot in the Federal Arts Project in New York City as a teacher and sculptor. More than 5,000 American artists would work for the WPA in the Depression, half in New York City, including future greats such as Jackson Pollock, Willem deKooning and Mark Rothko. Pay started at $23 a week. Stone still believes it was Roosevelt confidant George Biddle who sold FDR on the idea of an artists group. Although critical of FDR for not supporting the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, she supported him even if, "His idea of a painting was a sailboat." The mix of poverty and social unrest she saw combined with the artists and intellectuals she met helped shape a world view of sympathy for the poor and mistrust for authority. The poet Gwendolyn Brooks was her supervisor. She ate chicken dinner with the famed black preacher Father Divine. She was arrested and hauled off to jail for protesting when a relief agency wouldn't give a food voucher to a woman who fainted from hunger. The case was later dismissed. The Artists Project wound up being overseen by the U.S. Army, and friction between military men and artists grew. When the brass decided they needed warehouse space, many sculptures that hadn't been earmarked were cleaned out and lost. Two historians later told Stone many were dumped into the river. |