In 1938, the New York artist Minna Citron was commissioned to paint a mural for the new post office in Newport, Tennessee. Funded through the U.S. Treasury Section, a New Deal arts program, Citron selected for her subject the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), one of the most ambitious and controversial New Deal programs. Founded in 1933, the TVA combated troubling environmental and socioeconomic conditions in the South. Though often criticized—by residents who were displaced by TVA projects and by private utility companies who feared government intervention—the TVA received widespread support from artists such as Citron.
This paper examines the ways in which Citron used her mural, TVA Power, to celebrate the Tennessee Valley Authority. First, Citron emphasized the TVA’s role in promoting progressive farming techniques, through images of properly terraced and plowed fields, modern cultivating machines, and a view of the TVA’s newly retrofitted Muscle Shoals plant, which produced phosphate fertilizer designed to improve soil conditions in the South. In addition, Citron celebrated the TVA’s important role in providing Southerners with access to cheap electricity. Thus she portrayed both the Wilson and Norris Hydroelectric Dams; through a series of electric towers, Citron visually linked the dams in the background to a dairy farm in the foreground. Here, to emphasize the need for electricity in modern farming, Citron presented a state-of-the-art, rotating milking machine, presumably based on the Rotolactor, Borden’s popular attraction at the 1939 New York World’s Fair.
Citron was just one of several artists to portray TVA themes in Southern post office and courthouse murals in the 1930s and 1940s. Through their public murals, artists promoted the extensive environmental and socioeconomic work of the TVA. Thus using their New Deal mural commissions, artists such as Minna Citron helped to spread the gospel of the New Deal.
About the presenterLisa Dorrill
Lisa Dorrill is an Adjunct Instructor at Dickinson College with degrees in art history from the University of Virginia (B.A.), Northwestern University (M.A.) and the University of Kansas (Ph.D.). Her research focuses on American art of the 1930s, addressing in particular New Deal art, agriculture, and the environment. In 2018, she published “From Farm to Factory: New Deal Murals Celebrating the Tennessee Valley Authority,” in Re-Assessing the 1930s South, from Louisiana State University Press.