When Modernism Was Still Radical

The Design Laboratory was a pioneering school sponsored by the Federal Art Project (FAP), a program of the WPA. Founded in New York in 1935, it was the first US institution to offer comprehensive education in modernist design.

Yet the Design Laboratory was more than a school for commercial artists. It was also a vibrant point of contact between the business culture of America’s design entrepreneurs, the modernism of the avant-garde, militant  unionism, and the radical cultural politics of the Popular Front.

Although the Design Laboratory lasted only four years, it had a substantial influence on American visual and material culture. Its story reminds us that neither visual culture’s evolution nor the hegemony of consumer capitalism in the wake of the Great Depression were processes with predetermined outcomes.

PRESENTED BY
Shannan Clark received his PhD from Columbia University in 2006. His research focuses on the political, economic, social, cultural, and intellectual history of the twentieth-century United States.