When it comes to the arts in America, the second quarter of the 20th century is significant.

That’s not only because it was informed by European Modernism and Surrealism, two hugely influential movements that had already made transatlantic crossings by that time, but also because of two events that radically shaped society at large: the Great Depression and World War II.

Highlighting this period in its spring 2025 show, Gonzaga University’s Jundt Art Museum is presenting “Art U.S.A.,” a brand new exhibition that features 100 works by as many artists from that momentous period between 1925 and 1950.

The Great Depression in particular, and the New Deal programs that emerged in response to it, held some unexpected advantages for artists. One initiative that sprang out of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) was the Federal Art Project, which directly supported working artists and funded public art. Around 10,000 artists and crafters benefited from the FAP, as it was known, during its eight-year run.

“It was a recognition on the part of the Roosevelt administration and Congress that the cultural sector was an important sector of the economy, and if the U.S. was going to pull out of the Depression, one of the aspects of the economy that needed to find support was that cultural sector,” says Paul Manoguerra, the Jundt’s director and curator of “Art U.S.A.”

The FAP also spurred the founding of over 100 community art centers across the country, including one in Spokane.

Following the model of its nationwide counterparts, the Spokane Art Center was a cultural hub that hosted accomplished artists and cultivated both skills and knowledge among aspiring ones. The list of noteworthy artists who were involved with the center, located downtown, over its brief lifespan (1938-1942) included R. Bruce Inverarity, Robert O. Engard, James FitzGerald, Margaret Tomkins, Guy Anderson and Z. Vanessa Helder, all of whom are represented in the Jundt exhibition.

“This never existed on such a massive scale up until these New Deal programs, and it hasn’t happened again. I don’t mean to overstate it but, from an American perspective, one of the great parallels is Renaissance Italy and the way that important government entities and wealthy aristocratic families supported artists,” Manoguerra says.

The key difference is that the New Deal programs were very much focused on democratizing or at least expanding the creation and enjoyment of art, even among those who normally found themselves on the periphery.

Manoguerra calls it a “cultural pluralism” that manifests itself in different ways throughout “Art U.S.A.”

“The best way that I can describe this exhibition is ‘100 stories.’ I see it as made up of 100 visual anecdotes that, combined with the biographies of the artists, gives us a comprehensive picture of what art in the time period was like and the ways that art reflected American society,” he says.

“And then when you add up the 100 stories, you get this nice picture.”

Although space prevents us from retelling all 100 stories here — for that, there’s an eponymous book that accompanies the exhibition — what follows are five artists who represent the breadth and diversity of the works on display in “Art U.S.A.” All of which, save one, have been drawn from the Jundt’s own permanent collection.

Z. VANESSA HELDER (1904-1968)

Zama Vanessa Helder’s approximately 10-by-13-inch watercolor “Neighborhood Pine” is one of the pieces in “Art U.S.A.” that might speak to a wider public in the way that it elevates an ordinary view. A lone pine tree, hunchbacked by a lifetime of Inland Northwest winds, bows over a cluster of unremarkable boxy buildings — a shed, a garage, a house — under a gray sky.

Created in 1940, it could easily be a scene straight out of the post-Depression era in Spokane, where Helder was one of the artists hired by R. Bruce Inverarity to teach printmaking and watercolor at the Spokane Art Center. Helder, who was born in the rural northwest part of Washington state, had by that time piqued the interest of art appreciators throughout the region and beyond.

In 1943, Manoguerra says, “she ended up being included in a historically famous show at the Museum of Modern Art on Realism and Magic Realism. She was in that exhibition with artists like Edward Hopper.”

Having her work featured alongside the likes of Hopper and Charles Sheeler helped solidify Helder’s already strong reputation on both the East and West coasts. Accordingly, her name crops up again and again throughout the accompanying “Art U.S.A.” book because her life intersected with so many other regional and national artists from the period.

By the mid-1980s, however, her star had already begun to fade in the art world.

“Vanessa died in 1968 and all of her work got dispersed, mostly through the Westside Jewish Community Center in Los Angeles. They sold them off in tag sales,” says David Martin, a curator at the Cascadia Art Museum in Edmonds. He co-wrote a book on Helder for a major retrospective exhibition at the Tacoma Art Museum in 2013 that helped renew wider appreciation for her career.

Fortunately, Helder’s work and reputation were saved from further loss by Florence Reed, one of her former pupils at the Spokane Art Center. Reed, who later became the director of the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture, bought Helder’s now famous series of watercolors of the Grand Coulee Dam.

“If she hadn’t studied with Vanessa and then become the director of that museum, that whole series would have been gone,” Martin says. The MAC still has Helder’s Grand Coulee Dam series in its permanent collection.

CHIURA OBATA (1885-1975)

If you were to overlook the title of Chiura Obata’s late-1930s ink wash painting, “Angel Island, San Francisco Bay” you might think for a moment that the artist is depicting a seascape in his birth country of Japan. Through the image’s serene, pillowy lines, executed in a style that incorporates traditional Western watercolor and Japanese sumi techniques, a low mountain rises behind a distant steam-powered ferry. In the foreground the water ripples against the gently curving shoreline.

Yet this isn’t Okayama, where Obata was born (as Zoroku Sato) in 1885. As the piece’s title states, it’s Angel Island in the San Francisco Bay, captured from the vantage of the hills just beyond Berkeley.“You can see the influences that [Obata] learns through Japanese painting. But then he’s applying them to a very American and Western subject matter, which is San Francisco Bay,” Manoguerra says, “and in that case slightly ironically in that it’s Angel Island, which often gets referred to as the Ellis Island of the West because it was the immigrant processing station for the West Coast.”

Obata eventually became an American citizen, but his Japanese heritage was a liability when wartime xenophobia seized the country, fueled by the attack on Pearl Harbor. Following Executive Order 9066 in 1942, Obata was interned at San Francisco’s Tanforan Assembly Center before being moved to the Topaz War Relocation Center in the Utah desert.

Despite the camp conditions, Obata continued to practice his craft and live out the democratizing ideals that would have been right at home in the Federal Art Project.

“He and another artist in that camp created art programs. In fact, his surviving drawings and watercolors from Topaz are one of the great visual records of life in internment camps,” Manoguerra says.

Owing to the growing recognition of domestic injustices during that period of American history, Obata’s reputation has lately become more closely associated with the artwork that he produced during his incarceration. That body of work shouldn’t overshadow the talent and originality that he displayed across a variety of media throughout his entire career. “Angel Island, San Francisco Bay” gives viewers an opportunity to appreciate the kind of pieces Obata was producing well before he knew the cruelties of internment.

FAY CHONG (1912-1973)

In 1920, having emigrated from his native China, Fay Chong arrived with his family in Seattle. He was still in high school when he began honing his skills in different media, especially printmaking, and developing relationships with other young artists like Morris Graves and Andrew Chinn.

“Printmaking was taught more back in those days, the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s, so Fay started very early and was doing beautiful work. He and George Tsutakawa both went to the same high school, and they started winning awards for their printmaking,” Martin says. (Tsutakawa’s renowned sculptural work includes the unnamed aluminum fountain outside Spokane’s First Interstate Center for the Arts.)

Along with Chinn and others, Chong was a cofounder of Seattle’s Chinese Art Club. There he came into contact with artists like Mark Tobey, whose work also appears in “Art U.S.A.,” as well as Guy Anderson and R. Bruce Inverarity, both of whom have links to the Spokane Art Center.

These names aren’t dropped lightly. Tobey, Anderson and Graves would become leading figures in the Northwest School of artists, a regional movement that also included Tsutakawa and the first director of the Spokane Art Center, Carl Morris.

Chong worked fairly regularly for the Federal Art Project during most of the program’s existence. The FAP gigs encouraged him to add watercolor to his skillset in addition to printmaking. He used both media to capture different federal buildings and other landmarks.

Manoguerra quotes Chong’s own praise for the FAP in the “Art U.S.A.” book.

“I’m paraphrasing, but he said that if it hadn’t been for the federal programs, he just didn’t know where he would have been as an artist. And you see that in some of the other comments, especially the artists of color, where the federal art program allowed them to be professional artists where it would have certainly been more difficult for them otherwise.”

The linocut print featured in “Art U.S.A.” dates from 1936, two years before Chong began his involvement with the FAP. It’s a highly stylized intersection of waterways that makes its title, “The Stream,” read like an understatement. The curving lines of the currents contrast with the rigid verticals of the trees. A tidy, L-shaped arrangement of logs in the foreground creates, in Manoguerra’s words, an “insufficient dam” against the water’s force.

As Martin notes, Chong was just as interested in depicting the region’s civilization as its natural landscape.

“He also did a lot of work around the Hooverville in Seattle,” he says, “but the funny thing with Fay Chong is that his prints are mostly Western looking. You would think that with an Asian-inspired technique and medium, which printmaking is, his works would have looked more Asian, but they don’t. They’re almost modernist types of works, and they’re really exceptional.”

THOMAS HART BENTON (1889-1975)

Often mentioned in the same breath as Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry, Thomas Hart Benton was a major proponent of American Regionalism, a homegrown realist movement that arose in response to the abstraction of European Modernism. Its rise and fall broadly paralleled the trajectory of the Federal Art Project.

“Thomas Hart Benton is probably the most financially successful and influential of the artists in this exhibition,” Manoguerra says. “One of his pupils was Jackson Pollock. And in Pollock’s early images, there’s an element of surrealism to them, but they are Regionalist because he was learning from Thomas Hart Benton.”

Unlike many of the artists represented in “Art U.S.A.,” however, Benton’s region of choice wasn’t the Pacific Northwest but his native Midwest. With a few visual changes, his letter-sized lithograph “Loading Corn” might capture an agricultural workday on the undulating hills of the Palouse. But as it stands, the idyllic scene of two laborers tossing baskets of corn into a horse-drawn wagon is almost unmistakably set in America’s heartland. Benton himself said it was from a series inspired by an autumn in Missouri.

Fellow Midwesterner and Regionalist Grant Wood joins Benton in this exhibition with “Midnight Alarm.” Also a lithograph, this work centers on a farmer in pajamas urgently coming downstairs with a lit oil lamp. If you were looking for a neat encapsulation of American Regionalism’s deliberate contrast to Modernism, compare “Midnight Alarm” to Marcel Duchamp’s 1912 landmark work “Nude Descending a Staircase.”

“Most people will be familiar with Grant Wood even though they don’t necessarily realize that they’re familiar with him because of ‘American Gothic,’” Manoguerra says.

“But again and again I think there’ll be dozens upon dozens of talented artists here that people have never heard of. This is the kind of an exhibition that a big museum in a big city would be doing, and I’m proud that our collection is good enough to be able to do it.”

FLETCHER MARTIN (1904-1979)

Out of the 100 stories that “Art U.S.A.” aims to tell, the one that receives the most attention is the tale behind Fletcher Martin’s mural for the Kellogg, Idaho, post office.

In 1939, as part of the New Deal’s effort to spur both the construction and decoration of new federal buildings, the U.S. Treasury Department’s Section of Fine Arts held an art contest called the 48 States Competition. It attracted more than 3,000 submissions. The winning murals were to be installed in select small-town post offices in each state of the country, which was still two decades away from admitting Alaska and Hawaii.

The Kellogg post office garnered two notable entries: Jean Donald Swiggett’s “Exploration and Mining, Kellogg, Idaho” and Fletcher Martin’s “Mine Rescue.”

Swiggett’s watercolor is a triptych that centers on a pinned collection of maps and drawings. Those documents are bordered on either side by archetypal images of early 19th-century explorers and contemporary miners. Martin’s painting, by contrast, is rendered in a much bolder style, and its subject is more emotionally charged. It shows an injured miner being carried on a stretcher by two of his colleagues.

Though “Mine Rescue” was the one favored by the contest jury, Kellogg residents were not on board. A spread in Life magazine showcasing the 48 winning murals noted the opposition campaign that had united everyone from mining unions and politicians to the Idaho Art Association.

“The people of Kellogg, Idaho, saw the images of Fletcher Martin’s winning selection. That was the mural that they were going to get in their post office, and they hated it,” Manoguerra says.

“Some of the arguments were aesthetic — that it was too modern, too Futurist. But it was the subject matter that everybody in Kellogg seemed to object to. In a small community like Kellogg, everybody knew or was related to somebody who had been in danger or injured in the mines. So was that the reminder that you wanted in your post office when you went to go buy stamps or to mail a package?”

To better illustrate the story of how Kellogg’s post office eventually wound up with “Discovery,” a different — and far less fraught — Fletcher Martin mural that still adorns its wall to this day, “Art U.S.A.” will display “Lantern Test” and “Shake Shute,” two preparatory studies that Martin did for the 48 States Competition. They’ll be shown alongside Swiggett’s contest entry.

On top of that, the Smithsonian American Art Museum has loaned Martin’s “Mine Rescue” to the Jundt for this exhibition. The controversial painting is the only work in “Art U.S.A.” that isn’t drawn from the museum’s own collection. ♦

Art U.S.A.: One Hundred Works on Paper, 1925-1950

Jan. 25-May 10; Mon-Sat 10 am-4 pm • Opening reception Fri, Jan. 24 from 4-7 pm • Free • “Art U.S.A.” exhibition catalog $50 • Jundt Art Museum • 200 E. Desmet Ave. • More info, including on special tours and events, at gonzaga.edu/jundt