San Francisco Artists And Writers Union
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San Francisco Artists And Writers Union
The San Francisco Artists and Writers Union was a group of San Francisco artists and writers, formed during the Great Depression. History The group first met in late 1933. The group was not formally organized as a union (it did not engage in collective bargaining, in particular) but did help coordinate the provision of workers for various mural and artistic projects throughout the city. In particular, it helped organize San Francisco artists to respond to, and take advantage of, opportunities provided by the Public Works of Art Project and Works Progress Administration. The group's most significant political action was protesting against political interference in art, particularly in reaction to the controversy around Diego Rivera's Rockefeller Center murals and the Coit Tower murals, both in 1934. In the Coit Mural protest, union members picketed for two weeks. Members The group was founded by Kenneth Rexroth (a poet) and Bernard Zakheim (a muralist). Other members included Fra ...
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San Francisco
San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of California cities by population, fourth most populous in California and List of United States cities by population, 17th most populous in the United States, with 815,201 residents as of 2021. It covers a land area of , at the end of the San Francisco Peninsula, making it the second most densely populated large U.S. city after New York City, and the County statistics of the United States, fifth most densely populated U.S. county, behind only four of the five New York City boroughs. Among the 91 U.S. cities proper with over 250,000 residents, San Francisco was ranked first by per capita income (at $160,749) and sixth by aggregate income as of 2021. Colloquial nicknames for San Francisco include ''SF'', ''San Fran'', ''The '', ''Frisco'', and '' ...
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Great Depression
The Great Depression (19291939) was an economic shock that impacted most countries across the world. It was a period of economic depression that became evident after a major fall in stock prices in the United States. The economic contagion began around September and led to the Wall Street stock market crash of October 24 (Black Thursday). It was the longest, deepest, and most widespread depression of the 20th century. Between 1929 and 1932, worldwide gross domestic product (GDP) fell by an estimated 15%. By comparison, worldwide GDP fell by less than 1% from 2008 to 2009 during the Great Recession. Some economies started to recover by the mid-1930s. However, in many countries, the negative effects of the Great Depression lasted until the beginning of World War II. Devastating effects were seen in both rich and poor countries with falling personal income, prices, tax revenues, and profits. International trade fell by more than 50%, unemployment in the U.S. rose to 23% and ...
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Public Works Of Art Project
The Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) was a New Deal program designed to employ artists that operated from 1933 to 1934. The program was headed by Edward Bruce, under the United States Treasury Department with funding from the Civil Works Administration. The PWAP served as way to employ artists, while having competent representatives of the profession display their work in a public setting.''provided by John R. Graham, Curator of Exhibits, Western Illinois University Art Gallery, 1 University Circle, Macomb, Illinois 61455'' Although the program lasted less than one year, it had employed 3,749 artists, who produced 15,663 works of art. In an art exhibition that featured 451 paintings commissioned by the PWAP, 30 percent of the artists featured were in their twenties, and 25 percent were first-generation immigrants. Overview and purpose The purpose of the Public Works of Art Project was "to give work to artists by arranging to have competent representatives of the professi ...
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Works Progress Administration
The Works Progress Administration (WPA; renamed in 1939 as the Work Projects Administration) was an American New Deal agency that employed millions of jobseekers (mostly men who were not formally educated) to carry out public works projects, including the construction of public buildings and roads. It was set up on May 6, 1935, by presidential order, as a key part of the Second New Deal. The WPA's first appropriation in 1935 was $4.9 billion (about $15 per person in the U.S., around 6.7 percent of the 1935 GDP). Headed by Harry Hopkins, the WPA supplied paid jobs to the unemployed during the Great Depression in the United States, while building up the public infrastructure of the US, such as parks, schools, and roads. Most of the jobs were in construction, building more than 620,000 miles (1,000,000 km) of streets and over 10,000 bridges, in addition to many airports and much housing. The largest single project of the WPA was the Tennessee Valley Authority. At its peak ...
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Diego Rivera
Diego María de la Concepción Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodríguez, known as Diego Rivera (; December 8, 1886 – November 24, 1957), was a prominent Mexican painter. His large frescoes helped establish the mural movement in Mexican and international art. Between 1922 and 1953, Rivera painted murals in, among other places, Mexico City, Chapingo, and Cuernavaca, Mexico; and San Francisco, Detroit, and New York City, United States. In 1931, a retrospective exhibition of his works was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; this was before he completed his 27-mural series known as ''Detroit Industry Murals''. Rivera had four wives and numerous children, including at least one natural daughter. His first child and only son died at the age of two. His third wife was fellow Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, with whom he had a volatile relationship that continued until her death. His fourth and final wife was his agent. Due to his importance ...
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Coit Tower
Coit Tower is a tower in the Telegraph Hill neighborhood of San Francisco, California, offering panoramic views over the city and the bay. The tower, in the city's Pioneer Park, was built between 1932 and 1933 using Lillie Hitchcock Coit's bequest to beautify the city of San Francisco. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places on January 29, 2008. The Art Deco tower, built of unpainted reinforced concrete, was designed by architects Arthur Brown, Jr. and Henry Temple Howard. The interior features fresco murals in the American fresco mural painting style, painted by 25 different onsite artists and their numerous assistants, plus two additional paintings installed after creation offsite. Also known as the Coit Memorial Tower, it was dedicated to the volunteer firemen who had died in San Francisco's five major fires. A concrete relief of a phoenix by sculptor Robert Boardman Howard is placed above the main entrance. It was commissioned by the architect and cast ...
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Kenneth Rexroth
Kenneth Charles Marion Rexroth (1905–1982) was an American poet, translator, and critical essayist. He is regarded as a central figure in the San Francisco Renaissance, and paved the groundwork for the movement. Although he did not consider himself to be a Beat poet, and disliked the association, he was dubbed the "Father of the Beats" by ''Time'' magazine. Largely self-educated, Rexroth learned several languages and translated poems from Chinese, French, Spanish, and Japanese. Early life Rexroth was born Kenneth Charles Marion Rexroth in South Bend, Indiana, the son of Charles Rexroth, a pharmaceuticals salesman, and Delia Reed. His childhood was troubled by his father's alcoholism and his mother's chronic illness. His mother died in 1916 and his father in 1919, after which he went to live with his aunt in Chicago and enrolled in the Art Institute of Chicago. At age nineteen, he hitchhiked across the country, taking odd jobs and working a stint as a Forest Service trail cr ...
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Bernard Zakheim
Bernard Baruch Zakheim (April 4, 1898 – November 28, 1985) was a Warsaw-born San Francisco muralist, best known for his work on the Coit Tower murals. Early life and immigration Zakheim was born to a Hasidic Jewish family in Warsaw, then part of the Russian Empire. At the age of 13, he expressed his desire to become an artist and to work with his hands, rather than to continue his religious training as a rabbi. His mother objected and as a compromise Zakheim was sent to a technical training school to become a furniture designer and upholsterer. However, he did not actually give up on his artistic goal; he studied watercolor art privately and then was awarded a scholarship to the Polish National Academy of Fine Art, where he studied drawing, painting, and sculpture. After fighting in World War I, Zakheim and his wife arrived in San Francisco in 1920, where he lived and worked as a furniture maker in the Fillmore District, then a heavily Jewish neighborhood. Career In the ear ...
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Shirley Triest
Shirley Julian (1914–1995), also known by the names Shirley Staschen and Shirley Triest, was an American visual artist who co-founded the San Francisco Artists and Writers Union, and worked for the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Julian was a pacifist, and anarchist. Biography Staschen was born in Oakland, California on July 29, 1914. She attended the San Francisco Art Institute and the California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts). In the early 1930s she obtained a job with the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP). Around this time she married her first husband, fellow artist, Valentine Julien (1908–1964). In 1933 Staschen joined the WPA team led by Bernard Zakheim, painting one of the Coit Tower murals in San Francisco. The following year she participated in the San Francisco General Strike by picketing at Coit Tower. Also in the early 1930s Staschen attended the organizing meeting of the San Francisco Artists and Writers Union, alon ...
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Victor Arnautoff
Victor Mikhail Arnautoff (born Uspenovka, Taurida Governorate, Russian Empire, November 11, 1896 – died Leningrad, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union, March 22, 1979) was a Russian-American painter and professor of art. He worked in San Francisco and the Bay Area from 1925 to 1963, including two decades as a teacher at Stanford University, and was particularly prolific as a muralist during the 1930s. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen, but returned to the Soviet Union after the death of his wife, continuing his career there before his death. Early life in Russia and China Arnautoff was the son of a Russian Orthodox priest. He showed a talent for art from an early age and hoped to study art after graduating from the gymnasium in Mariupol. With the outbreak of World War I, he enrolled in the Yelizavetgrad Cavalry School. He went on to hold military leadership positions in the army of Nicholas II and the White Siberian Army, and was repeatedly awarded medals for his service. While ...
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History Of San Francisco
The history of the city of San Francisco, California, and its development as a center of maritime trade, were shaped by its location at the entrance to a large natural harbor. San Francisco is the name of both the city and the county; the two share the same boundaries. Only lightly settled by European-Americans at first, after becoming the base for the gold rush of 1849 the city quickly became the largest and most important population, commercial, naval, and financial center in the American West. San Francisco was devastated by a great earthquake and fire in 1906 but was quickly rebuilt. The San Francisco Federal Reserve Branch opened in 1914, and the city continued to develop as a major business city throughout the first half of the 20th century. Starting in the later half of the 1960s, San Francisco became the city most famous for the hippie movement. In recent decades, San Francisco has become an important center of finance and technology. The high demand for housing, driven ...
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Art In San Francisco
Art is a diverse range of human activity, and resulting product, that involves creative or imaginative talent expressive of technical proficiency, beauty, emotional power, or conceptual ideas. There is no generally agreed definition of what constitutes art, and its interpretation has varied greatly throughout history and across cultures. In the Western tradition, the three classical branches of visual art are painting, sculpture, and architecture. Theatre, dance, and other performing arts, as well as literature, music, film and other media such as interactive media, are included in a broader definition of the arts. Until the 17th century, ''art'' referred to any skill or mastery and was not differentiated from crafts or sciences. In modern usage after the 17th century, where aesthetic considerations are paramount, the fine arts are separated and distinguished from acquired skills in general, such as the decorative or applied arts. The nature of art and related concepts, such ...
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