Depaul Art Museum - Short Review

The Depaul Art Museum’s shiny new building beckons to El riders passing through Lincoln Park. It’s so close to the Fullerton stop you can practically see into the second floor window from the platform. Just beyond that window, Ink Paper Politics: WPA-Era Printmaking from the Needles Collection is on display at the DPAM through December 21. The new show exhibits prints produced by a variety of artists funded by the federal Works Progress Administration in the midst of the 1930s-era Great Depression. Collective workspaces and federal funding united artists from diverse ethnic and racial communities, creating a historic moment that spurred innovative printmaking. Over 100 pieces grace the walls with images of work and play, home and factory. Trains are a common theme, representing Depression poverty through urban hustle and rural transience.

Martin Lewis’s Passing freight depicts a night train racing past a sleepy country home, playing with shadow and light in excellent clarity. The busy print of Millard Owen Sheet’s Family Flats, 1935 layers people over one another’s homes in a cosmopolitan tenement setting. It depicts laundry lines and back-porch stairways criss-crossing the scene in angles, exuding movement and life. Some pieces focus on personal stories: a tap dancer seems to burst off the edges of the print, a preacher clutches a large bag of money in his fist, and two men tousle on a dock - a violent scene expressed with surprising lyricism as they spiral into one another’s bodies. One of my favorites, Autumn in Mill Street, 1940 by Harold Maxwell Hahn, depicts a simple country road on a fall day, but the precise detail and rich colors are conveyed with phenomenal skill. This piece stands out as a rare moment of serenity in an otherwise fast-paced exhibit. The recurring train themes remind visitors of the bustling transportation just outside the gallery, and the economic themes provide a more cutting reminder to our own recession concerns. The DPAM is accessible and affordable, and the timely art is well worth a ride on the rails.