Looks like how Stephen King described that one character in The Tommyknockers who was put through some “half-assed disintegration process” and then swept off into a pocket dimension.
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More Solid Bearmon, this time during the Zanzibar Land Disturbance. Play Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake!!!
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Awesome game, those damn Seegson Working Joes scare me more than the xenomorph 
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What kind of dark magic did you pull to manifest this, ZG?
What are you??
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Pretty! 
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The Workers - Florence Kawa
Art For The Many - The Legacy of the Federal Art Project
In the mid Thirties the American economy had entered a period distress that was so great and Depressive they gave it the very clever nickname “The Great Depression”. One of the consequences of said poor economy was a staggering high unemployment rate spawned by business and industry closures as company after company went virtually insolvent overnight.
So naturally this needed to be fixed enter the Works Progress Administration, one of the many, many government agencies formed under the FDR government as a part of its New Deal strategy to bolster the American economy. The WPA mostly concerned itself with building public works which is things like roads, schools, post officers, stations and, sadly, some of the interment camps used during the detaining of Asian-Americans over the course of WWII
Leaving that aside I want to talk about a special branch of a different WPA initiative known as Federal Project Number One which was basically a form of government assistance given out to people involved in the industries of culture.
There was the Federal Writers Project which sought to keep writers in long term employment mostly by means of employing them in schools to teach people to write, giving them a stipend so long as they could show they were writing, authoring textbooks and travel guides and it even went around collating stories from freed slaves about their time as slaves.
There was the Federal Music Project which mostly either taught music to kids and unemployed people or put of extremely cheap or even free government subsidised musical performances for people.
The Federal Theater Project which staged a variety of performances from “Living Newspapers” which helped Americans understand issues of the day, workshops in performance for unemployed Americans including African-Americans (though the usual discriminatory practices related to segregation still forced them into their own programs separate from White Americans though performers from white and Black programs collaborated together) and general productions that were cheap to most people.
So you have a division of a government program that was comfortable enough to criticise the government, treated people more equal than the actual representative government they worked under and performed virtually for free. Sounds good right? Jokes on you idiot, anti-Communist hysterics killed the FTP before any of the other projects under FP#1
But I am here to (finally) talk about the Federal Art Project, which was created to make sure that painters, sculptors and artists in other forms of material expression could live and work as they shose.
While this was the third attempt the Treasury Department made to support artists with two others dying off and the Section of Painting and Sculpture which was in charge of negotiating artists commissions for the creation of art in public spaces to the point where America wound up having its own muralist tradition overnight basically. A lot of those murals were greatly informed by Mexican Social Realist mural styles, one day I will talk about them as well.
The FedArtPro however mostly existed to pay people a stipend for consistent artistic output priced at 24 bucks (roughly 567 USD today, in AUD that is a hundred dollars more than my government assistance), producing posters for all those other branches of the government I mentioned earlier and other fun ones like the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Civilian Conservation Corps and other fun things the US government could do if they could but don’t.
A lot of artists were able to make a living, the appointment of a very forward thinking curator in the form of Holger Cahill, a man with a history in curating modern art collections like the MoMA in New Yrok, meant that even artists working in the very novel forms of abstract art could survive to paint another day. It gave the FedArtPro a lack of bias in style and genre that it would have had if someone from the government was in charge and even then the FedArtPro constantly had to justify its choices especially for murals and displays of “non-objective” styles.
Many artists like De Kooning, Pollock and Rothko got their start here and for many of them the works they produced alongside some 10,000 other artists (at its highest membership count) are the very few representational pieces by them before their full dedication to abstract art.
Pieces like this work however were the result of the broad range of arts programs they offered unemployed people, this piece was sewn by a woman for such a program in Milwaukee perhaps one of the most successful of these courses alongside the programs set up for African-Americans some of whom attribute these programs to helping save not only their careers but their lives.
Mercifully the FAP (the only time I am calling it that) didn’t get murdered in a fervid haze of anri-communist hysteria, it was sunset by the treasury. Dropped in the night amid a return to a sustainable employment rate and the onset of US involvement of in WWII necessitating cuts to a lot of New Deal programs. A lot the workers and project departments would be folded into the war effort as camouflage painters, designing propaganda posters and producing art courses for military posts.
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Oh fuck I forgot the fifth division, the fifth division of Federal Project One was just an archivist corps that would make indexes of materials stored in town and state level archives and libraries. of course this very boring department lived the longest though it did so by being folded into various other WPA and government branches.
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Halloween season is over, so changed it up to some awesome artwork, and I’m surprised how good it looks that the forum fit the shape into the circle that way, making it look pretty awesome.
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Well, one out of two. 
jk
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HMF Members know that this profile picture stands for high quality hot takes and bitching about a 24 year old video game everyone else forgot 
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I mean, games 2, 3, and 4 were pretty good but I don’t know that anyone really forgot about the first version of The Sims.
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Of course they don’t. I mean, if you ask me how to spawn the Tragic Clown npc, I can still tell you that. TS1 is a difficult game, like it doesn’t even have a weekday/weekend system. As long as you don’t miss work/school for 2 consecutive days you will be fine, unless you want to get rid of your sim children who will never grow up. Man, the first Sims is wild!
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Going on a vacation or going to the magic lot also pauses the need to go to work
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Changed my profile pic to Secretary Buttigieg. Here’s to 2028.
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City Night, 1926 - Georgia O’Keeffe
Views From The Shelton - O’Keeffe’s New York Period
O’Keeffe is perhaps most famous for her more colourful and organic works that emerged from her earlier life in New York especially her almost yonic depictions of flowers or her cow skull and geographic paintings from her most famous artistic period working in New Mexico however for the duration of her residence in the Shelton Hotel with her partner Alfred Stieglitz, a noted photographer and art dealer, would lead to a seemingly singular body of work that appears much different to her most well known works but does appear to show a lot of techniques used in the rest of her catalogue.
The first immediate similarity of course is the use of angles especially the very defined and very straight ones you see here used to give a sense of rising depth then repeats it going off into the distance that simulates the effect of walking through a street crowded with skyscrapers. The sort of sense of openness you get with O’Keeffe’s later works especially some of the cow skull paintings gets replicated not by the wide openness of the landscape but in the ever-shrinking yet still infinite recess of the street as it goes into the night towards the moon.
In fact the moon, the only natural, tangible element in this scene, is the roundest object in the frame but it also contrasts the scene by being the source of O’Keeffe’s trademark softness, its almost angelic pulsations of white moonlight contrast especially with the stark white edifices in the background and doubly so with the almost monolithic black slabs in the fore. It goes well with the similarly natural sky, the cool blue of the night in a beyond liminal space.
Next is the slight asymmetry in the scene which mimics the sense of slight disproportion found in a lot of O’Keeffe’s work which makes sense of course because asymmetry happens a lot in nature but contrasts with man-made structures which adopt straight lines as a means to allow function over form. This sort of effect leaves the buildings something more akin to basalt stacks than Manhattan at night.
Finally I just want to so this painting along with many others like it from this period of her work is currently on display in the US, right now the exhibition entitled “My New Yorks” is in Atlanta at the High Museum of Art until February 16, next year. It is an attempt to do what I have done here and reconcile what appears to be a very distinct visual language distinct from her earlier and later works to those said other more natural works she is known for.
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Can’t tell if that’s supposed to be the night sky as seen from the ground while standing between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, or the ruins of an Isu temple from Assassin’s Creed. Also can’t tell which of the two options my mind went to is sadder.