View in Golden Gate Park (WPA)

Jennie Lewis

This lithograph was published by the California Works Progress Administration (WPA) Federal Art Project (FAP), though it is not included in the General Services Administration list of WPA Print.

Jennie Lewis sketches a Spanish style building in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, in the mid-1930s. She offers the viewer a peek through vegetation created using a series of flattened, decorative patterns. In her 2005 Book Club of California publication "WPA Federal Art Project - Printmaking in California 1935-1943", author Elizabeth Seaton comments about Jennie Lewis on page 75:

"Jennie Lewis's modernist, "primitive" style (aligning her with self-taught artists such as the customs officer Henri Rousseau, in one critic's view) gained her the attention of FAP director Holger Cahill, who helped her secure a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1940 (container 99). During the same year, Lewis's work hung at...Paul Elder Galleries."

And, on page 76: "In 1938 she gained work on the FAP, evidently in need of financial assistance. Shy and shabbily dressed (according to the memories of co-workers), Lewis worked quietly producing...some 32...lithographs, many of them San Francisco city and wharf scenes."

Tragically, Jennie Lewis died on March 13, 1944, after getting lost in a snowstorm while hiking in the Sierra Nevada near Meadow Lakes, CA.