Barbara Diamond grew up in New York City where she developed her interest in art. Her parents were in the Music and Theatre world. After moving to New Mexico as a young adult , then on to Colorado she furthered her education and curiosity in visual arts .Barbara is a Mixed Media artist , working in sculptural paper- mache , and Collage. She has been teaching art regionally for decades including the Bemis School of Art , and is now at Green Box Arts Festival.
My father, Archie Musick, was a frequent student at the Broadmoor Art Academy and its successor, the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, between 1927 and 1942. In the ledger box where he saved favorite letters from fellow artists, I found a series of letters among artist friends exchanged during the Great Depression of the 1930s. They gave such eloquent, personal insight into the writers, I wanted to find a way to share them. This presentation of the letters (with additional narration in Archie’s words taken from his writings) was created for the 75th anniversary of the beginning of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs that overcame the Depression.
The New Deal saved the country from both economic and psychological depression, funding roads, bridges, parks, buildings, soil conservation, reforestation, and other infrastructure; initiating programs now taken for granted including federally-insured banking and Social Security; and creating jobs in every field–including the arts–that restored dignity as well as put food on the table for millions of families.
These heartfelt, often humorous, sometimes opinionated letters tell the artists’ very human story of their lives during the Great Depression era.
Barbara Diamond: legs.diamond@comcast.net
These heartfelt, often humorous, sometimes opinionated letters tell the artists’ very human story of their lives during the Great Depression era.
Barbara Diamond: legs.diamond@comcast.net
The Works Progress Administration (WPA) was an ambitious employment and infrastructure program created by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1935, during the bleakest days of the Great Depression. Over its eight years of existence, the WPA put roughly 8.5 million Americans to work building schools, hospitals, roads and other public works. Perhaps best known for its public works projects, the WPA also sponsored projects in the arts—the agency employed tens of thousands of actors, musicians, writers and other artists. –from History.com
About the film: For an insider’s view of the lives of artists during the Great Depression, the impacts of New Deal art programs, and the onset of World War II on their lives, listen in on these letters written among artist friends between 1929 and 1944. In this filmed readers’ theater presentation, images of the artists and their work accompany the writers’ heartfelt, often funny, sometimes poignant words, showing that era’s human side.