The Little Red Schoolhouse is symbolic of times past when there actually were little red school houses. Katherine Milhous, the creator of this poster, was a newspaper illustrator and book designer of Pennsylvania Dutch heritage. She was an artist for the Federal Art Program (FAP) in Pennsylvania during the Depression and produced a colorful series of posters representing rural Pennsylvania.

She attended the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. She was author/illustrator of "The Egg Tree," a 1951 Caldecott Medal book, "Lovina: A story of the Pennsylvania Country, Snow Over Bethlehem" and other stories. She illustrated "The Silver Pencil" by Alice Dalgliesh, a 1945 Newbery honor book, and won the 1967 Drexel Award, among other honors.

The "By the People, For the People: Posters from the WPA, 1936-1943" collection of the Library of Congress, consists of 908 boldly colored and graphically diverse original posters produced from 1936 to 1943 as part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal. Of the 2,000 WPA posters known to exist, the Library of Congress's collection of more than 900 is the largest. These striking silkscreen, lithograph, and woodcut posters were designed to publicize a wide variety of public programs from art to safety. Seventeen states were involved as well as the District of Columbia. The posters were made possible by one of the first U.S. Government programs to support the arts and were added to the Library's holdings in the 1940s.

Many New Deal administrators believed that art could be a part of the daily lives of all Americans, not just the elite, and could enrich the lives of all who came in contact with it. The main objective of the FAP was the employment of out-of-work artists, but this was not its only goal. The activities of the FAP also included art production, education, and research. The project employed artists in the fields of easel painting, sculpture, photography, mural painting, and graphic arts, and it also held exhibitions and organized community arts centers through which many Americans were first introduced to the arts. Another well-known, well-received FAP project, the Index of American Design, created a survey of illustrations of American decorative and folk arts from colonial times through the late nineteenth century.

Medium : 1 print (poster), lithograph, color

Created/Published : Pennsylvania Art Project, WPA, between 1936 and 1941

Creator : Katherine Milhous, Artist, 1894 - 1977

Part of the Works Projects Administration Poster Collection housed in the Prints & Photograph Division of the Library of Congress

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Product #: cph3f05670