HOW TO LOCATE NEW DEAL ART
Internet search engines have revolutionized the art-detective business. Good key words: "WPA mural," "Depression art," "Federal Art Project," "post office mural," along with the name of your town or state.

Many states, counties, and towns have compiled directories of their New Deal art. Some are referenced on the "Resources" page and we are happy to add others.

An indispensable source is wpamurals.com. Here Nancy Lorance has published a comprehensive, state-by-state list of post office murals, with scattershot mentions of New Deal art in other locations as well. The site contains information about the various New Deal programs, artist bios, conservation efforts, exhibitions, art appraisals, etc. Some information is hidden several levels down, so follow the links.

There are still original records to be searched. The Archives of American art has documents on microfilm as well as transcripts of oral histories conducted with WPA (and other) artists in the 1960s.

Other resources: your local library, your state and community historical society and arts commission, the Chamber of Commerce, newspaper files (many now on-line), and art museums.

Any public building (post office, library, school, hospital, public housing project, military base, courthouse, etc.) that was around 75 years ago could be a New Deal art site. It never hurts to stop in and ask (phone inquiries are often unproductive).

TAKING PHOTOS IN POST OFFICES
Despite what you may be told, individuals are allowed to take photographs of New Deal art in post offices. The official USPS web site explains the terms and conditions; you might want to print out this page and have it with you.

IS THAT MURAL A FRESCO?
The Registry considers a fresco a type of a mural, so we put Artwork type = mural; medium = fresco. Fresco is pigment applied directly to plaster; it is painted on the wall rather than glued on as a canvas mural is. You can often tell a paint-on-canvas mural by looking for the cross-hatch texture of the canvas underlying the painting. Frescoes are more "transparent" and the paint appears to have melted into the wall.

INFORMATION GATHERING
Here is a paper form you can take with you to record the information the Registry is interested in.

PHOTOGRAPHY
The challenge in photographing monumental public art is to get adequate light, avoid obstacles such as light fixtures and foliage, and find an angle that is not too oblique. There is no need to fit an entire 18' mural into the shot; home in on the most interesting part. The Registry typically shows a detail rather than a whole work; our automatically-generated pages require a standard format and we have compromised on a square. You can crop the photo yourself or submit the entire photo and have us do the cropping.

Digital cameras create photos with much higher resolution than a computer screen can show. This is not a problem except that the photo may take a minute or two to upload. If you know how to reduce the resolution, or if you can crop your photo to 800 x 800 pixels, it will upload faster.