UC Berkeley

This dissertation examines state art and cultural patronage during the long War on Poverty (1959-1973) in New York City. It also contends that prominent works of art synonymous with the period shared a view of poverty and an employment of urban space with the federal anti-poverty project. Chapter One reframes canonical artworks by the artist Claes Oldenburg by pinpointing their location at the geographical center of Mobilization for Youth (MFY), the first federal anti-poverty program. I argue that Oldenburg’s early environmental works evidence a view of the urban poor as a foreign population in line with early anti-poverty planning, and that this position helped to catalyze the artist’s development of environmental form in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Chapter Two details the expansive Art and Culture program of the largest anti-poverty program in New York, Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited (HARYOU) between the years 1962 and 1965. The chapter elucidates the tension between the organization’s anti-colonial rhetoric and the role of its public art – dance, carnival and parade forms, and Amiri Baraka’s Black Arts Repertory Theater/School (BARTS) – in recruiting participants and suppressing potential rebellion following the 1964 uprisings in Harlem. Chapter Three interprets the Abstract Expressionist Norman Lewis’ painting in relation to his distrust of HARYOU despite nearly a decade as an instructor there, arguing that, for Lewis, the organization represented the victory of liberal Civil Rights policy in the Cold War at the expense of the Black Marxist platforms of the 1930s and 1940s. Chapter Four unearths the work of the artist Phyllis Yampolsky who was employed in the NYC Parks department during the high-profile summers of 1966 and 1967, when the city’s administration sought to prevent urban uprising. Yampolsky devised a series of ‘Happenings,’ a term for participatory performance, for a slew of public parks as part of the city’s anti-poverty programming. The chapter argues that Yampolsky’s work illustrates a forgotten populism within early participatory experiments in the U.S., but that it also weaponized the Happening form within the city’s anti-riot strategy. Chapter Five centers on the color-field painter Betty Blayton, an architect of HARYOU’s art program. The artist is most well-known for catalyzing two permanent art institutions – Harlem’s Children’s Art Carnival and the Studio Museum – out of the anti-poverty era’s final funding streams. Where this institutional legacy has overshadowed the reception of her artwork, I argue that the artist’s color-field practice was part of her creation autonomous spaces for growth within HARYOU and of permanent cultural infrastructure following her departure from the organization in 1967.

My study uses the fact that art and cultural form were weapons in the “war” on poverty to upset common scholarly argumentation about the politics of postwar American art. This perspective transforms the boundaries between critical opposition and tacit alignment in relation to modernist development and emergence. On the one hand, my study shows that the War on Poverty’s Community Action Agencies deployed a wide range of art – from advanced forms to community or heritage idioms—as part of an arsenal of anti-riot propaganda. Public performance, including dance, theater, carnival forms, and open-air displays of painting and sculpture, served as spectacular draws to anti-poverty’s social programs. This public art filled streets and parks to deter the civil disturbance that fueled federal response to the urban poor. At the same time, my study reveals how artist social workers created art, pedagogy, and new cultural institutions that exceeded the confines of social policy. Spurred by federal funds, these artists fused art with the labor of social reproduction, placing pressure on historical notions of art’s relationship to everyday life and human vitality. They built lasting cultural resources in divested communities and marshalled art as a resource at the margins of the U.S. state.