Courtesy of Mount Holly Town Library
Independent filmmakers Michael Maglaras and Terri Templeton introduce their film “Enough to Live On: The Arts of the WPA” in Belmont on Sunday.
Sunday, May 1 at 4 p.m. — BELMONT — On Sunday, May 1 at 4 p.m., the Mount Holly Town Library and the Book Nook will co-sponsor a screening of “Enough to Live On: The Arts of the WPA” at the Mount Holly School. Independent filmmakers Michael Maglaras and Terri Templeton of 217 Films will introduce the film and take questions following the screening. This film is now premiering in museums across the nation so we are particularly honored that the filmmakers are coming personally to bring us this film that captures and identifies the significance of art in the American cultural life and history.
In May 1935, as part of the great return-to-work effort known as the Works Progress Administration (the WPA) President Franklin Delano Roosevelt returned Americans to work in the service of the rebuilding of a society staggering under the weight of the Great Depression.
Under the Federal Art Project of the WPA, these workers included artists, writers, actors, and musicians; for Roosevelt believed that in order to lift ourselves out of economic stagnation we would also need to rebuild the culture of America at the grass roots level.
Featuring more than 70 works of art from this period, including notable works by Rockwell Kent, Dorothea Lange, Stuart Davis, and Reginald Marsh, as well as rare footage of WPA artists at work, this film tells the story of how Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal moved art in America out of the rarified atmosphere of the elite and brought it directly to the American people as an inspiration and catalyst for change and recovery in the 1930s.
The screening will take place in the Mount Holly School gymnasium. The event is free and open to the public (wheelchair accessible).
