General Admission $13, $10 Students

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In May 1935, as part of the great return-to-work effort known as the Works Progress Administration, President Franklin Roosevelt put Americans to work in the service of rebuilding a society staggering under the weight of the Great Depression.

Enough to Live On: The Arts of the WPA celebrates the 80th anniversary of this epic undertaking and the Federal Arts Projects that using art, theatre, writing and music, reignited the soul of an America caught in the Depression’s grip.

Featuring more than 70 works of art from this period, including notable works by Rockwell Kent, Dorothea Lange, Stuart Davis and Reginald Marsh, as well as rare footage of WPA artists at work, this film tells the story of how Roosevelt and his New Deal moved art in America out of the rarified atmosphere of the elite and brought it directly to the American people as an inspiration and catalyst for change and recovery.

(One such work, a mural titled The Harvest by painter Arnold Blanch, was installed in Fredonia’s Post Office in 1937.  It was cleaned and restored in 1972 and remains on exhibit today.)

Filmmaker Michael Maglaras will introduce Enough to Live On and also will lead a talk-back and Q&A following its screening. 

Michael MaglarasOriginally trained as an opera singer in the U.S. and Europe, Maglaras performed widely as a singer and opera director.  He is now the principal of a well-respected international risk management and insurance consulting firm headquartered in Ashford, CT.

He founded 217 Films in 2003 with the aim of introducing a new audience to the rich history of the art of the American experience. His first project was a film about the American painter Marsden Hartley called Cleophas and His Own, which was based on a forgotten personal narrative by the iconic and seminal Modernist.

Since then, he has produced the first ever documentary film about Hartley, entitled Visible Silence: Marsden Hartley, Painter and Poet, which was followed closely by the first feature-length documentary about Hartley’s contemporary and friend, the painter John Marin, entitled Let the Paint be Paint.

Maglaras has been called a “filmmaker of nearly Bergman-like gravitas.”  His work with producer Terri Templeton has been called “comparable to that of the widely acclaimed Ken Burns.”

Enough to Live On: The Arts of the WPA was released in May 2015.  It is his sixth film.