Eudora Welty
WPA Press Agent
Towards a New WPA:
Supporting Women Artists Now
Free Play Reading & Panel Discussion
Time: Monday, March 22 at 7 p.m.
Place: Cherry Lane Theatre
38 Commerce St., New York, NY
Reservations Are No Longer Being Taken:
You can sign up for a waiting list at the door on the
night of the performance for any tickets that are released.
On Monday, March 22 at 7 p.m., WomenArts will present Towards A New WPA: Supporting Women Artists Now,
a play reading and panel discussion, at Cherry Lane Theatre in New York. This free event is offered in collaboration with NewShoe Theatre Group, Cherry Lane Theatre and the League of Professional Theatre Women.
During the Great Depression of the 1930’s, President Roosevelt created the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a federal jobs program that employed over 40,000 artists at its peak. During that intense period of national crisis, the government investment in the arts resulted in a tremendous outpouring of creativity that helped lift the country’s spirits. The WPA nurtured a generation of American cultural icons, including women such as Eudora Welty, Zora Neale Hurston, Berenice Abbott, and Louise Nevelson.
To bring this history to life, NewShoe Theatre Group will present a staged reading of Mixed Relief, a one-act play that juxtaposes voices of women writers of the WPA with contemporary women theatre artists, Kara Lee Corthron, Cassandra Medley, and Ruth Maleczech. Directed by Teresa Pond with sound design by Lauren Rosen, the reading will feature actors Black-Eyed Susan, Lynn Cohen, Lizan Mitchell, Donetta Grays, Melanie Nicholls-King, and Peter Reznikoff, among others.
Following the reading, a panel of leading arts activists will discuss new strategies to increase arts funding and promote cultural equality. The panelists will include Martha Richards, Executive Director of WomenArts; Elizabeth A. Sackler, founder of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum; Arlene Goldbard, author, speaker, and leading advocate for a new WPA, and Carol Jenkins, media analyst, founding president of The Women's Media Center and Emmy-winning former television journalist.
The League of Professional Theatre Women will host a reception following the panel.
Mixed Relief is by NewShoe members Suzanne Bennett, Jill Campbell, Marya Cohn, Dana Leslie Goldstein, Michele Aldin Kushner and Andrea Lepcio.
This event is free, but reservations are recommended.
To Make Reservations: Please click here>>
WomenArts is a world-wide community of artists and allies that works for visibility, empowerment, and opportunity for women artists. The WomenArts website at www.WomenArts.org serves over 500,000 visitors a year.
Towards A New WPA: Supporting Women Artists Now is part of the third international Support Women Artists Now Day (SWAN Day), a celebration of women artists in all disciplines, which is held annually in the final weeks of March as part of Women’s History Month. The goal of SWAN Day is to honor the full diversity, beauty and power of women's creativity. For more information, please visit: www.SwanDay.org.
Special Thanks: WomenArts & SWAN Day 2010 are supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lambent Fund of the Tides Foundation, the Leo S. Guthman Fund, The Sister Fund, and by gifts of time, energy and money from artists and arts supporters around the world. If you would like to support our work, please click here>>
Eudora Welty Photo: Courtesy of Eudora Welty LLC & Mississippi Department of Archives and History
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