(solemn music)
- There were competitions under a different program
called the Federal Arts Program.
This was entirely different than the WPA art program.
You had to win.
You were like a competitor.
- We are such a rural community.
We're a farming community.
And to know that the New Deal was sort of about keeping hope
and keeping that we're all gonna get back
on the right track again after some tough times.
- Because I was also teaching, the New Deal was what sort
of institutions or projects did the feds sponsor
that reached way out here to Wyoming.
- It sounded interesting, 'cause I had always seen
that mural up in the Riverton Post Office.
My mother worked there for 25 years,
so I'd go in there a lot and didn't really know anything
about it until I got a phone call about the mural
in the post office, and that's when I started researching.
- [Narrator] Many types of artwork surround us
throughout our lives.
Some is familiar, and some we forget about
because of its familiarity.
(dramatic music)
This story began when I heard the painters,
Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollack,
who was born in Cody, worked together in Wyoming
as part of the New Deal arts and culture program.
Well, that story turned out to be mostly urban legend
but somewhat true.
My path led me to a public art model that is largely
in place 85 years later.
(gentle music)
I tracked down five New Deal-era artists
who left their public art as their legacies
in Wyoming, during the Great Depression.
The works depict regional conditions during the 1930s.
It took an economic collapse
to carve out this public art niche.
♪ They used to tell me I was building a dream ♪
♪ And so I followed the mob ♪
♪ When there was earth to plow or guns to bear ♪
♪ I was always there, right on the job ♪
♪ They used to tell me I was building a dream ♪
♪ With peace and glory ahead ♪
♪ Why should I be standing in line ♪
♪ Just waiting for bread ♪
- [Narrator] The New Deal was a set
of federal programs launched
by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt
after he took office during the Great Depression.
The programs lasted until American entry
into the Second World War.
♪ Brother, can you spare a dime ♪
♪ Once, I built a tower to the sun ♪
♪ Brick, mortar and lime ♪
♪ Once, I built a tower, now it's done ♪
♪ Brother, can you spare a dime ♪
(patriotic music)
- [Reporter] 250,000 people are in Washington
for the inauguration, but for those unable to get there,
the Universal Newspaper Newsreel is rushing pictures
of the epic ceremony by the fastest air express plane
in the country.
- First of all, let me assert my firm belief
that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,
nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror.
I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument
to meet the crisis, broad Executive power
to wage a war against the emergency.
(jazz music)
- [Narrator] New Deal programs touched every state,
including Wyoming.
New Deal programs improved the lives
of ordinary people, and failed manufacturing
and agricultural business were stabilized,
following the 1929 stock market crash.
By 1933, 25% of all Americans were out of work.
The New Deal hired
2.5 million men and women who built
highways, bridges,
schools, theaters,
homes, post offices
and parks across the country.
The New Deal brought
civilian conservation core workers
from around the country to Wyoming
where they worked in places like Park County,
constructing the Hart Mountain War Relocation Camp
and to Platte County building campgrounds
at Guernsey State Park.
The New Deal Work Progress Administration
and the US Department of the Treasury hired artists
to create public art and art projects.
(jazz music)
- I was seeking a course in American Studies
that dealt with American art, and I stumbled
on to the fact that the federal government
in the 1930s had supported art and artists
to some extent.
I didn't know what.
- [Reporter] The sensitive fingers
of artists are poorly suited to manual labor,
and in finding suitable work for musicians
and other artists, the WPA has contributed greatly
to the culture of America.
A typical project is this Negro choir singing the spirituals
that are the real folk music of America.
(gospel music)
Painters, too, contribute their bit
to making the works program a real
and permanent accomplishment.
These reproductions of the American scene
of today will make this one of the most fertile periods
of our country's art.
(gentle music)
Some of this work is done on canvas,
but much of it is created on the walls
of our schools, libraries and other public buildings
in the form of mural paintings.
Of particular interest is the great mural in the mess hall
of the military academy at West Point,
depicting great warriors of history.
(gentle music)
An art long dormant in the United States is the creation
of stained glass windows.
One project devoted to this art has made a window
for the military academy at West Point depicting scenes
from the life of Washington.
(gentle music)
Commemorative tablets like this are among the contributions
of sculptors to the Works Program,
and they also create works of art
for our parks and public buildings.
- [Narrator] Five such public mural projects
adorn US post offices in Kemmerer,
Riverton,
Powell,
Greybull and Worland.
(jazz music)
Eugene Kingman painted a triptych about the prehistory
of the Kemmerer area.
- My dad was a New Deal artist, among many other things.
He did three post office murals under the program.
He was a prodigy.
He painted from the age of five.
And he was promoted by his parents to paint.
He was a mural painter, so I'm pretty sure
that through his connections
at RISD, Rhode Island School of Design,
that that's how they probably gave notices
of there was a contest, people could bid,
'cause I know he bid on those
while he was at RISD.
So I'm sure that's where the connection made,
in how he was chosen.
All the post office murals, be they a WPA program
or a US Treasury program for post office murals,
that they all had to reflect the community
in which they were being painted or produced.
I know for Kemmerer,
that he had his students, his students from RISD out there,
helping him install, and he was finishing up,
and he gave seminars about the mural,
which I think passed on a lot of good information.
I know he was just very interested in science and art.
He was one of these people
who really was ahead of his time,
in terms of interdisciplinary thinking,
that science and art are together.
I know when the National Parks Service hired him,
along with his geologist brother-in-law.
They were a little skeptical about an artist,
'cause his brother-in-law,
they were hired to do some of the mapping
of the national parks.
Then he was hired to paint paintings,
I mean, and maps.
He was a cartographer during the war,
so he knew cartography.
And yet, beyond that, he was a great landscape painter.
So they were a little skeptical, according to my aunt,
were a little skeptical when they say, "Wait a minute.
"We're hiring this artist
to do some technical things?"
Well, they were absolutely delighted by the results,
because they knew he was accurate.
He went out there, oh gee, three or four times
and then presented what he was going to do.
And then they approved it, and he went and did that.
I really liked those particularly, the dramatic dinosaurs.
I mean, I just, I really, plus,
he even was a good mural painter.
And again, he was the greatest artist in the world,
of course, coming from the daughter.
On top of being a great artist,
he was really a very nice guy with a great sense of humor.
(upbeat jazz music)
- [Narrator] George Vander Sluis painted
the Riverton post office mural.
He was one of many young artists
who attended the Broadmoor Art Academy in Colorado Springs.
- He came from the Colorado Fine Arts Center.
I do know that he came up here
into Fremont County, and particularly in Riverton.
He was looking for inspiration as to what
to paint for a mural for the Riverton Post Office.
- In Colorado, there were a number of schools
where fine art was being taught, and one
of the longest traditions was the Broadmoor Art Academy,
which became the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center.
There are a number of artists that were associated
with that school, and some were only there for one summer,
some for many summers, either as students
and then faculty, or in a lot of cases, both.
So I knew that Vander Sluis was one of the people
that was there, going in the fall of '39.
So I've always had an interest, and then,
at one point, was contacted by one of the sons,
saying they had a great, big pile of their dad's material,
and they were interested in doing something with it,
and would I be interested in helping them with that?
- He spent several days in the area checking out the variety
of activities, the sugar beat farming, the lambing,
the cattle raising, and he ended up settling
on the lambing scene, which he witnessed
at the Pitts-Madden Ranch that's located north of Riverton,
on Highway 26, roughly about four or five miles,
heading towards Shoshoni.
- We sent to school in Cleveland,
at the Cleveland Institute of Art,
and then came out to the Fine Arts Center
and was actually married when he was out here,
and I think divorced before he left,
but I'm not quite sure what the history is there.
After he left Colorado and went to New York,
he taught at Syracuse from the fall of '47 until 1980.
And his style progressed over time, became more modern,
more abstract, and then he followed things
that interested him beyond
what he saw, say, in the Colorado landscape.
- It's now known as Cottonwood Courts,
but at that time, it was a lambing and shearing location
for William Madden, who owned that area in 1906.
And from there on, that's where George Vander Sluis came
about his inspiration for the lambing scene that is painted
at the Riverton Post Office.
- There was material from the time he was in Colorado,
which certainly would fall into the category
of kind of a modernist take on regionalism.
When he went back to New York,
he just became, I think, more modern and then moved
into some pure abstraction,
and then he had things related to space.
In the '70s, actually, a little before that,
in the, I think, about the mid- to late-'60s,
he actually went around and painted barns,
or the sides of barns or barn doors, in New York State,
Upstate New York, with geometric designs.
And then he taught, at the same time,
so art really was his life.
(upbeat jazz music)
- [Narrator] Verona Burkhard made the mural in Powell
and later became a prominent member
of the Western Colorado art community.
- I've been here 15 years
and always had seen the mural when I've come in.
We've talked about it with other historic entities
and just always thought, "I need to do some more research,"
and just kind of something that got put on the back burner
until recently when that book, when I was given the book
on the New Deal, Things in Wyoming, the New Deal art,
and this gentleman, who I mentioned, Henry Yaple,
who had gone to Deer Lodge, where Verona has another mural
at the post office there, and through a series
of him doing some research, he came to me
and piqued my interest again.
- The way in which I got to know Verona Burkhard was
through my family.
My father was Frank Mechau who, in his career
as an artist, he was a Coloradoan, who was the head
of the Department of Drawing and Sculpture and Painting
at Colombia University, in the early 1940s,
and it was there that he met Verona Burkhard,
who was already an accomplished artist,
but who nevertheless studied further
at that time at Colombia University,
and that was under my father, Frank Mechau.
And so, they became close friends,
and then, as a result, she became someone
who was a friend of all of the family.
I'm one of four children,
and my mother was very close to Verona, also.
Verona, although she was from the East,
from, first of all, New York City and then New Jersey,
and sometimes spent time in Massachusetts,
she moved to Grand Junction in about 1947.
- There was a fashion designer in her family.
Her grandfather was a sculptor.
He has a sculpture in Washington Park, in New York City.
She went to Cooper Union.
It looks like, I remember her saying something
about teaching at Colombia University,
a lot of art, a natural progression for her.
And she has a mural in North Carolina.
And it recently was taken out of the post office,
and the post office then became the historical center.
And just last month, the mural has come back
to the post office, the original place it was done,
but now that post office is a historical center.
So it kind of has a nice, little synchronicity,
how that came back.
- As a young woman, she did take a couple of trips out West,
and she really fell in love with the West,
so much so that she spent some summers
in Wyoming, Buffalo, Wyoming.
She made great friends with some ranchers there
and actually went on trail rides
and had pretty wonderful experience of being with cowboys
and horses and the wonderful landscapes in Wyoming.
- I can speak for the one that's in ours.
It's representing a farming family,
and there's sheep and cows, and I can't remember.
They're holding, I think they're holding a baby.
But there's chickens, and you know,
we are such a rural community.
We're a farming community, and to know
that the New Deal was sort of about keeping hope
and keeping that we're all gonna get back
on the right track again, after some tough times.
- When she came out West,
on those visits, she thought and felt strongly,
clearly, just looking at her art,
that the local scene of both people and landscape,
horses, cattle and so on, should be, and wildlife,
should be portrayed.
In her own development, she began to experiment
with more abstract forms of art.
And when she came to Colorado, in about 1947, to move here,
she was attracted to the mountains
but found that the mountains around Redstone, Colorado,
where my father was, and she would've worked perhaps
with him doing some projects,
and they had a good friendship,
so she, Redstone, Colorado is high up in the mountains,
and she could not stand the cold winters,
so she spent more time in the desert, in Utah,
and Grand Junction is one of the lowest spots in Colorado
and has a dry climate, not much snow,
so she was attracted here,
but Grand Junction was hardly a center for the arts.
It's a regional center that supported mining
and resource development and farming and ranching
but was not friendly to art, but it didn't have too much,
had not developed it very much.
She offered classes to both young and old, and at length,
with other people interested in the arts.
They established this institution,
the Art Center of Grand Junction.
Were it not for her and a couple
of those other people and certain people
who were financially able to give some backing,
this institution wouldn't have been established.
(upbeat jazz music)
- [Narrator] Manuel Bromberg painted the mural in Greybull.
At age 100, he is still actively painting and sculpting
from his studio in Woodstock, New York.
- A forensic science movie, where they do these things
on murders, and they have forensic clues,
all of a sudden, I saw one.
There was Greybull, Wyoming and the streets of Greybull,
and I said, "Oh, I've got to see this."
But I didn't see anything other than the ordinary buildings
and houses and so on, so I have no idea,
other than the forensic science little cut
of Greybull, what Greybull looks like today.
However, there are people that came to Woodstock,
who are in the art world,
who had, oh, they've been to Yellowstone.
That's what I was trying to think of.
And they stopped at Greybull, and they loved the mural.
And they wrote to me about it.
These are art connoisseurs.
So that's the only one,
the connection I had, again, with Greybull was
from people who had stopped to see, had gone
in the post office and seen the mural.
I've been drawing cowboys and dances.
I went to all the era barn dances and stuff.
Cowboys were romantic, you know.
They're costumes are so great, everything about it,
that I knew that I wanted to do cowboys but
cowboys rounding up the herds,
cowboys that maybe at dances.
I mean I though that over in my mind.
So then I was looking at some old, old masters,
and there was a kind of religious scene,
well done, with a group
of prophets, I guess they were, in the landscape,
and then a lone figure, probably Jesus, you know,
and I, at the time, had done a painting
called the Harmonica Players, which was shown
in the World's Fair, in New York, in American Art.
And it was a beautiful painting of a black man
on a mud road, on his knees, and his hands up like that,
playing a harmonica, beautiful line, you know, on 'em.
And the painting was highly regarded
in New York, and so I thought,
"I've got to use this painting again somehow."
So I decided I was gonna have
a cowboy playing a harmonica, you see,
and the prophets were gonna be cowboys who were singing,
like a trio themselves, you know.
So you have the trio.
You have the central harmonica player.
For the sake of the composition, I found I had to do this.
I had to put in a cloth sweeping in this way.
I had to add a figure of a backside of a guitar player.
These were added later, but the original one,
they weren't in it, or that wasn't in it.
And it all turned out quite right.
So that's how Greybull, which was immediately,
there are artists, well-known artists, who wrote
to The Section of the Fine Arts talking
about seeing this mural, calling me a boy.
A boy, there's a boy doing this mural,
which is such a swell job.
What a word to use, swell, you know.
But I didn't know these letters were going.
All I knew is The Section of the Fine Arts were suddenly
treating me like I was a delicate, precious thing (laughs),
that had to be handled carefully
with high regard.
So while I was in the process of doing this,
I got a letter from the director
of The Section of Fine Arts,
of the mural thing, a man named Ed Rowan,
saying that Simpson, is that familiar to you?
- [Man] Yes.
- Well, not the Simpson you knew but his father.
Simpson Was objecting to my mural.
Here I was happily working on it in Colorado,
and here comes this man, objecting to my mural.
Why was he objecting to it?
No aesthetic reason,
he objected that the boots were not Wyoming boots
or the hats were not Wyoming hats.
And all the while, I thought the best boots
that cowboys could buy was in Texas.
Everybody wanted a pair, Amarillo boots.
I mean, no matter where you were, as a cowboy,
that was the most, and here this guy is complaining,
and I have to change the hats.
I have to get the correct boots.
So we put him off.
We said, "Oh yes, I will do.
"I will do color.
"I will do Wyoming hats.
"Yes, yes, I'll make the boots.
"I'll take off the Amarillo boots."
That was my only big problem with it.
While I was painting it, all of New York,
seemed the art world, came to Colorado.
And the reason for that was that most
of the people, including Kuniyoshi, were former students
of my teacher, and in respect to him,
in fact, the weather was great,
and it was the place to be,
the best of the art world was in Colorado Springs.
So Life Magazine came out,
because the artists that were well-known in New York,
were all now in Colorado,
and it would be a nice summer issue or something.
But Life Magazine,
there was a well-known New York photographer,
spotted this beautiful girl
who was a model in New York,
and he knew her as a fashion model.
And she was a wonderful artist, as well,
better than the fashion artists who were doing her.
And he said, "Oh Jane."
Her name was Jane Dow, D-O-W.
Unless it was Jane Doe,
it couldn't be simpler than that.
He says, "Jane."
He says, "if you can find a young man to go with you,
"we'll ut you both out in the garden of the gods,
"these red rock formations,
"and do a cover for Life,"
you know, the two of you sitting on there.
So she asked me if I'd like to sit wit her.
And of course, we later on got married, this gorgeous woman.
I had no idea how talented she was
until, you know, fantastic draftsman.
And Jane was in New York.
So all in all, it seemed once I got to leave a mural up,
I might as well go to New York.
It was sort of fun.
But I was cold.
I was lonely.
And Jane was in New York, and she's gorgeous.
I decided the hell with it.
I'm gonna get married.
(Manuel laughs)
Planning is not my big thing (laughs).
I'd been given another mural commission.
The draft board wasn't the least bit interested in that.
So Jane went home, went back to her mother
to have the baby, and I went in the Army.
And of course, at the time, my only vision
of the Army was All Quiet on the Western Front.
Have you ever seen that movie?
Well, you know, with bayonets and all that.
Well, this is what I'm getting into.
But not at all, it seems to me,
I don't know if there's an angel over me
or this is all pre-written.
I have no idea, but I must say,
it's too, it just reads too well.
(upbeat jazz music)
- [Narrator] Louise Emerson Ronnebeck was commissioned
to paint the mural in Worland, which was later moved
and now on display in Casper.
- The time was very tough for everybody,
and artists as much as anybody else.
Portrait commissions dried up during the '30s, obviously.
Louise entered 16 competitions for murals,
and she won two, and think that's a pretty good,
pretty good odds there.
She tried for, I mean, I could probably list,
if I was reminded, I could give you a list
of all the competitions, but it was Amarillo,
Washington DC, Worland, Wyoming
and all over the West.
My grandfather, Arnold Ronnebeck moved
to Paris, in 1907, to study art.
He studied sculpture, there, between 1907 to 1913,
when the war started.
In 1926, wanted a break,
and he heard all the great things
about Taos, New Mexico,
and Mabel Dodge Luhan had invited him, at her home
in Taos, New Mexico, and coincidentally, at the same time,
Louise Emerson was also visiting Mabel Dodge Luhan in Taos.
Coincidentally, both of them came from New York
to travel out to Taos, and two New Yorkers met
in Taos, in 1926, and they spent several weeks together,
and horseback riding and painting
and sketching and were married, that was in 1925,
and they were married in 1926 and then moved to Denver.
Because of his, my grandfather, connection
with Marsden Hartley, he knew Alfred Stieglitz quite well,
and one of my grandfather's busts of Hartley was exhibited
at Stieglitz's gallery in 1925, at an American place.
Arnold Ronnebeck also wrote an essay for, oh,
the exhibit was Seven Americans,
and so he knew Stieglitz and Georgia O'Keeffe quite well.
In fact, in October of 1924, he spent two weeks
at Stieglitz's Lake George home, up in New York.
I didn't know her very well.
I grew up in Chicago, and Louise lived in Denver.
I had this idea of her.
I would see her when she would be, she would pass
through Chicago on her way to or from someplace.
She had lived in Bermuda for many years.
So sometimes she would go, every year, she would travel
from Bermuda to go back to Denver, and she would stop
in Chicago, so I'd see her there.
To me, she was this kind of vision, this glamorous vision,
that came in wearing all this silver jewelry.
She would always sweep in with lovely gifts.
She painted my portrait when I was quite young.
Unfortunately, my parents got rid
of that portrait (laughs), so I don't have it.
One of my favorite paintings of hers that I have is
of a very odd scene.
It's a car accident, and there's just crowds
of people and cars.
It was very dramatic.
She liked action.
She liked to paint battle scenes for,
Old West battle scenes and things
that maybe people may not think were stereotypical
of what a woman would paint, but she also did,
she did like to paint.
She did a lot of portraits of local Denver,
society people, and she loved crowds,
and she did a well-known painting, 4-B,
my father's fourth-grade class.
She liked a lot of crowds.
And her other well-known painting is
The Trial of Mary Elizabeth Smith, from 1937,
which depicted a trial that she went
to every day, to watch the trial.
There's a woman, a young girl,
who killed her abusive husband.
And Louise went to the trial every day,
and made a lovely painting out of it.
(upbeat jazz music)
- [Narrator] What's the legacy of New Deal art?
Art forms in public spaces are as old as the hills.
Northern Arapaho tribal member and artist, Robert Martinez,
provides workshops on indigenous art for young people
and has painted murals in Riverton.
- I wanted to get across that there's a very rich
and long historical tradition and history
of Natives creating art and artifacts.
Everything that was used as a tool
in most Native cultures was adorned in some way.
And then of course, there was always other objects
that were super adorned.
So we have a long history of creating art.
Well, it kind of depends on the site
and the specific images that are there.
Some of them were used for commemorating different things.
Some of them were used as way points.
But we do find a lot of the symbols that come
into what we know as traditional life
and contemporary life now, such as the wheel.
Those particular forms, like Castle Gardens,
we can interpret those as a wheel
or shield designs and motifs.
The Arapahos were known originally
for doing mostly geometric designs.
And we're also known to use different geometric designs
for different things.
For example, a simple square could mean a person,
or it could mean a trail or a track or a camp or a place,
depending on the person that was doing the design.
A triangle could mean a lodge or a tent or a mountain,
depending on who did the actual design.
So we had certain shapes that are common,
but they could mean very different things,
depending on the artist.
(solemn string music)
- [Narrator] Michael Cooper, in Nashville, Tennessee,
was commissioned to make a mural in Cheyenne, Wyoming
for Ed and Karen Murray.
- That was considered a call out of the blue.
Ed happened to have been here in Nashville,
was over at Vanderbilt, with one of his daughters,
and happened to be driving past one
of my murals and liked it.
He said, "Well, that's pretty cool."
And he looked down in the bottom right-hand corner,
and there was my name and phone number.
And he had an idea of something he wanted to do,
back in Cheyenne, and he literally just called me and said,
"Would you be interested in painting a wall in Cheyenne?"
It's like, "Sure," and we met the next day for breakfast.
Micky and I went over there, sat down and talked with him.
And the more we talked, the more he said,
"Yup, you're the guy."
And that was it.
We're on our way to Cheyenne.
- We wanted this to be a fun, collaborative type process,
and so there was discussion as to the subject matter.
Of course, there's Wyoming wildlife discussed.
There was Wyoming themes, real cowboy, you know,
Cheyenne frontier days.
Wyoming's a cowboy state and so forth,
and that type of discussion as subject matter,
and so people were very surprised at first
when my wife and I decided to go with a Renaissance cherub.
- It's one of those things where as many times
that I've tried to come up with something specific
for that wall, we went through a long design process,
and it still came down, Ed had in his mind
what he wanted and what he envisioned.
So it didn't matter what I came up with,
with different ideas.
It still came back to he had a pretty good idea.
So we took his idea, fine-tuned it, put it on paper,
and it turned out, yup, that's perfect.
That's what he envisioned.
- My father, Ned Murray, he was a voracious collector
of numerous different things, everything from wagons
to fine art, but he also collected cherubs,
and so I grew up as a kid surrounded by cherubs.
And he let me know that these cherubs,
many of which were antique cherubs,
came from Western motif, Western settings,
including saloons and hotels, that had been part
of the Old West, because cherubs would denote
and exude a civility and a peace.
- And so, ended up putting that on the wall.
It was a fun project.
It was, how you'll say, it was intense.
There's a lot of work involved.
If I'm not mistaken, I probably did 90%
of that one by myself, had some local help on a few things,
actually got my son out there to help
on the stripping of the wall.
We had to strip the entire 40-foot-by-60-foot wall
and use a special paint that'll be there forever.
I'm assuming it still looks good out there.
- [Man] It's still there.
- [Michael] There we go, I like that.
That's good, makes me feel better.
(upbeat jazz music)
- [Narrator] The New Deal was criticized and praised
but was an important chapter in American history.
- Art, back in the day, was considered, well,
only if you had European training,
and it was in an art museum.
People, in the '30s and '40s, didn't have art
in their homes, that was just, well,
they couldn't afford it, number one,
but it wasn't considered any art if you put it in your home.
Art was only in a art museum, had to be European-trained.
The subject matter had to be European-influenced.
And the New Deal brought in a whole different perspective
on that, to say let's celebrate the American artists,
let's celebrate the American worker, the American,
Native Americans whose art really inspired
many other forms of art.
So I really revere the New Deal
as something that was purely American and grassroots.
- Well, what I did is another way of doing a landscape.
I mean, the show I had was liked
by everybody, because who doesn't like nature.
And all I did was say, "Take a look.
"Look at this.
"Isn't this beautiful?"
I mean, there's a profundity to this scene.
And there's a possible extension of going
from there into there, into something.
So I'm happy with it.
I'm very happy with it.
But I didn't get there, I didn't get there by accident.
- Going fast-forward to the Second World War,
some of the artists, like George Vander Sluis for example,
were part of programs that were actually designed to use art
to further our efforts in the war.
And the whole idea of the Ghost Army was
that we created big images on canvas
that made it look like our troops, our tanks,
were heading one direction, and hopefully,
we were heading the other direction.
And they were wasting their bombs on canvas,
instead of on our people and our equipment.
- And Verona, who led a, as they say, a solitary life.
Though she had many friends, she really lived a life
that was as if it was under a kind of guiding star
that overcame that sense of what was important really,
made her overcome many difficulties,
and she didn't lose her way.
- She was a modern woman at a time
when that wasn't as common.
And she did have a fairly good work-life balance,
balancing the children and the husband
and the household, but she was always dedicated to her art,
and I think it showed, and she worked hard and studied hard,
and I think left us a nice legacy.
- I got there by having a breakdown.
I got there by going through the war,
having a great success in my prewar times
and realizing in France, being with great French artists,
Picasso and Cocteau and so on, there was far more to art
than what I was into, than what I was doing.
(lively music)
- [Narrator] New Deal-era people
and programs helped shape current attitudes
about the evolving social culture and physical landscapes
of Wyoming and America.
(solemn music)
The artwork created during the New Deal added
to the beautification of cities and towns in Wyoming.
Many Wyoming communities take part in creative place-making,
creating environments where people want to live,
work and play and improve the livability
of a place they want to call home.
- There's a lot of wall art that's come up around town,
and different people comin' in, doing different things,
people donating spaces and say, "Yeah, we'd love
for you to do something,
people coming from all over the world,
different artists coming here just to put some artwork up.
So again, it shows a lot of diversity,
a lot of different styles.
(lively music)
- [Narrator] Public art can raise awareness
and provide safe spaces where communities can come together
to discuss tough issues around topics like diversity,
the environment and sustainability.
- An interesting example of what we see
in Downtown Laramie,
it is public works of art, except down here,
they're working on murals on the side of buildings,
and it's really pretty interesting.
You have to drive down through there and look at it.
- Just within the last couple of years,
it has exploded.
So it's free.
It doesn't cost you a thing.
You can be entertained for days,
just by walking around town.
Anytime you can go out and see art,
I encourage you to do so.
Whether it's in public or in a gallery
or in the artist's studio, get out and see it.
If you can't get out, look at it online (laughs).
(dramatic music)
(solemn music)
(audience applauds)
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