Marketing Animals - Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

L
ike most New Deal projects, the jobs and
government spending of the agency were
too modest to end the Great Depression.
Nonetheless, the WPA employed a small army of
photographers, writers, painters, poets and
illustrators that left behind a cache of creative
work that is an invaluable window into the culture
and politics of the decade. Among that work is
the famed WPA art posters and its “Zoo”
promotional series, which endeavored to boost
the local economy of a given city by promoting
the urban tourism of zoo attendance. Housed at
the Library of Congress, today these beautiful
advertising tools mark out for us the moment in
American public culture when zoos and wild
animals became modern in a twentieth-century
sense.
The WPA series ordered American citizens
to collect the kids and “Visit the Zoo.” The
silkscreened posters offered such institutions as
both portal into the natural world and modern
entertainment option featuring wild animals as
embellishments to urban American life. Indeed, in
the “Zoo” series we sense no bars or cement or
feces, no stereotypic pacing, no jostling zoo
patrons, no man-made noise or overflowing
garbage bins, no bread lines or homeless
camps, that is, none of the troubling realities of
animal captivity, city living or the Depression.
What we do see are idealized creatures
‘WORKS PROGRESS
ADMINISTRATION’ POSTERS
In 1933 and 1934, as part of the “New Deal” economic plan for the United States, President Franklin
Roosevelt’s administration created a new federal agency called the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to
hire artists to document and promote American cultural life.
Text by Susan Nance
132
set in artist’s canvas-style backdrops that eschew
detail in favor of stylish efficiency. These
advertisements seem aimed at questioning the
perceived dividing line between nature and
culture, which we often associate with modernity,
because they portray nature as culture. Here
animals captured from wild or foreign places are
extracted from those histories and geographies
and presented as living works of art. Being statefunded,
with no advertising agency accounting
department to answer to, the WPA artists created
advertising posters that were indeed experimental
and sleek, although they may have seemed too
high-minded for many zoo patrons.
What is more, the WPA “Zoo” animals
come across as works of modern art with speciesspecific
personalities. Indeed, the ads depict the
conventional characters that each of these
species carries even today: panda bear as cute
stuffed toy, hippo as rotund comic, herons as
silently elegant posers, panther as lithe stalker,
polar bear as ice berg, stampeding bull elephant
as powerful provocateur who addresses the
viewer directly and dares him or her to stare in
awe as long as possible before jumping out of
the way. Each of these artistic animal essences
represents a particular emotion, be it
(anthropocentric) paternalism, delight, mirth, or
awe. And, here is advertising in its most powerfully
efficient and democratic mode. The WPA zoo