‘New Deal for Artists’ recalls WPA impact on arts (review)
At the start of the documentary “New Deal for Artists,” Pulitzer Prize winner Studs Terkel — who got his start in the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Writers’ Project — laments that the contribution the New Deal and WPA made to the arts is not taught in schools and has been lost to history.
The remastered and re-released “New Deal for Artists” is narrated by Orson Welles, himself a beneficiary of the Federal Theater Project. In addition to Welles and Terkel, the WPA aided thousands including writers Richard Wright, Margaret Walker and Ralph Ellison; painters Diego Rivera, Jackson Pollock and James Brooks; and actors Will Geer, John Houseman and Howard Da Silva.
