City Will Invest $25M In Local Artists For Recovery Effort

NEW YORK CITY — The legacy of a New Deal-era arts program will inspire anew in New York City.

Mayor Bill de Blasio on Thursday announced the creation of a "New York City Artist Corps," a $25 million investment in culture and the arts.

The program will hire 1,500 artists to create murals, perform at pop-up shows and more across the city, de Blasio said.

"We want to give artists opportunity and we want the city to feel the power of our cultural community again," he said.

De Blasio explicitly drew inspiration from the 1930s New Deal program the Works Progress Administration, commonly known as the WPA.

The WPA hired famous artists like Jackson Pollock to create public art. Many iconic images — such as Dorothea Lange's portrait of a migrant woman in the Great Depression — were created by artists under the WPA.

De Blasio similarly used another New Deal program — the Civilian Conservation Corps — as the model for the city's new City Cleanup Corps, which will hire 10,000 New Yorkers to beautify the city.

Sade Lythcott, CEO of National Black Theater, spoke during de Blasio's announcement for the artist corps. She said artists — a workforce that has been hard hit by the coronavirus pandemic — aren't just necessary for the city's economic recovery, but will help heal its "soul."

"The most venerable author, in my eyes, the great Tony Morrison once said, 'Times of dread are precisely the time when artists go to work,'" she said. "'There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.'"