Description
During the 1930s, Bernard Perlin was one of many artists employed by New Deal programs such as the Works Progress Administration to create public works of art, notably post-office murals, that made visible the history of the United States and the labor of those who built this nation. In the early 1940s, Perlin worked for the Office of War Information (OWI) under his mentor Ben Shahn, a leading artist in the American Social Realist movement.
During this time, Perlin produced powerful images, reproduced as posters and an iconic advertisement for war bonds, that decried the horrors of World War II and supported the U.S. war effort in the fight for liberty. Join Dr. Melanie Herzog to learn about Perlin’s and Shahn’s approach to art and propaganda during these years, and their use of the visual language of social realism in murals and their work for the OWI.
Melanie Herzog is Professor Emerita of Art History at Edgewood College. She is currently a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a lecturer in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She holds an M.F.A. in ceramics and a Ph.D. in art history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. With an emphasis on artists’ encounters across cultural and geographical borders, socially engaged artistic practice, and intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, and representation, she teaches, publishes, and lectures widely on art and visual culture of North America and the African diaspora.
Her publications include Elizabeth Catlett: An American Artist in Mexico (2000), Milton Rogovin: The Making of a Social Documentary Photographer (2006), and numerous essays, most recently “‘Thinking About Women’: Form, Substance, and Radical Politics,” in the companion publication for the exhibition Elizabeth Catlett: A Revolutionary Black Artist and All That It Implies, which opened in 2024 at the Brooklyn Museum and will travel to the National Gallery and the Art Institute of Chicago in 2025. She also curated the exhibitions William Kentridge: See for Yourself (2022) and Objects of Substance (2023), both at The Warehouse Art Museum in Milwaukee.
