The Alaska House Art Gallery: Claire Fejes

Claire's arts training under the WPA:

The Works Progress Administration was one of several Depression-era New Deal programs, instituted by Franklin Roosevelt to relieve national unemployment by creating public works jobs.

Of the WPA arts project in New York City, Fejes said,

"All the artists could get a job. They didn’t pay that much, but they would put them in a Y and they would give them the paper, the paints they needed, or the clay. And here I was, fifteen years old. I said to my sisters, ‘Come on. We’re going. It’s free.’ And we went almost every night. There was free paper, free models, free clay. I did my first sculpture there. It was wonderful."

Fejes studied anatomy, stone-carving, sculpture and painting through the WPA – at the Newark Museum, Newark Fine Arts School, and the Art Students League. Among her teachers were sculptors Jose de Creeft, Aaron Goodleman, and Saul Baizerman. Baizerman, like Diego Rivera, inspired Fejes with his commitment to the people, and to the theme of the common laborer.

Of her training and her teachers, she said:

"They saw I was serious. A lot of those students came and sat on stools and wore their hats and didn’t get their hands dirty. I was a serious student. They’d rather have somebody like that in the class than somebody that wasn’t that serious."

Her dedication paid off, anticipating the boiler-furnace energy that would characterize Fejes’ mature work life. If the Depression stripped away dreams of college and art school, forcing her to work at a factory by day, she stuck with her ambition, studying with Baizerman and de Creeft at night, modeling for WPA sculptors and artists, and cleaning up after classes to pay for her lessons.