National Park WPA Poster

WPA National Park Posters: The Federal Art Project and the Graphic Wilderness

The Works Progress Administration's (later Work Projects Administration) Federal Art Project, operating from 1935 to 1943, employed thousands of visual artists during the Great Depression to create public art, murals, and posters. Among the most enduring output of this program are the national park and public lands promotional posters - screen-printed works in a dramatically simplified graphic style that have become icons of both the New Deal era and American conservation culture.

The Federal Art Project Style

The WPA poster aesthetic emerged from the particular constraints of Works Progress Administration's screen printing process. Screen printing (silkscreen) required that each color be applied separately as a flat, opaque layer - gradients and blends were technically impractical. The artists who worked in WPA poster studios - including the Chicago-based Illinois Art Project and the New York Poster Division - developed a visual language perfectly adapted to these constraints: bold silhouetted landscapes with hard-edged color separations, a limited palette of four to six colors, simplified organic forms for trees, mountains, and water, and display typography set in Art Deco or Arts-and-Crafts-inflected faces.

The national park posters in particular combined the influence of Japanese woodblock prints (in their reduction of landscapes to flat color planes and their radical simplification of natural form) with the bold promotional instincts of commercial poster design of the 1920s and 30s. The result was a visual world in which Yellowstone's geysers, Zion's canyon walls, and the Shenandoah's rolling hills were reduced to their essential graphic character.

Ranger Doug and the Revival Tradition

The WPA national park style was largely forgotten until 1977 when Doug Leen (known in the parks community as Ranger Doug) began researching, documenting, and eventually reproducing the original posters. His company Ranger Doug's Enterprises has produced authorized reproductions and new-style WPA park posters since the 1980s, sustaining the visual tradition and sparking a wider revival that has made the style ubiquitous in American home and office decor and inspired dozens of commercial illustration studios working in the genre today.

Contemporary Applications

The WPA park poster style has been widely adopted for state, city, and country promotional posters; outdoor recreation brand content; and nostalgic lifestyle branding.