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Concetta Scaravaglione was a critically acclaimed American sculptor. Among the awards and grants she received were major commissions from the Federal Art Project in the 1930s, a grant from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Prix de Rome award from the American Academy, the first such award to be given to a woman. During the early 1920s, Scaravaglione had a love affair with a fellow art student that ended badly. The disruption it caused to her art helped shape her lifelong conviction: she would never marry. Scaravaglione was elected to membership in the New York Society of Women Artists, a group of thirty painters and sculptors. Scaravaglione said, “To sculpture I am grateful for enjoyment and for an opportunity to be free and independent, to create to the extent of my capacities.”

Chapter 4 turns to efforts to transform the material and visual cultures of consumer capitalism during the 1930s and early 1940s. One of the most important of these endeavors was the Design Laboratory, which opened in 1935 in New York City as the country’s first comprehensive school of modernist design. Initiated under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project, the Laboratory attracted left-leaning faculty and students who disapproved of the streamlined style that typified much of the material culture of consumer capitalism at the time. In contrast, they developed a functionalist modernism that reflected their social-democratic ideals of utility, affordability, and sustainability. White-collar unions in New York as well as Consumers Union promoted this aesthetic of social consumerism as well. Public patronage for cultural initiatives like the Design Laboratory proved unreliable, however, especially as the federal government turned its attention from the Great Depression to the Second World War.

While Edendale’s arts community focused on sustaining independent artistic expression, the involvement of the federal government politicized art-making dramatically and narrowed the range of acceptable art. Although the Federal Art Project set out to support creative aesthetic explorations, it pushed for artists to create art in a manner that would speak in a language which was directed to the people and comprehensible to them. This coercion on the part of the federal government restrained the experimentation of the artists of Edendale. The earlier questions on the modes of expression and unique artistic vision were drowned out by the demands of the subject matter. The project directors instead pushed artists to create work and art that the public wanted. This chapter discusses the federal government’s move to limit the intimate expression of artists, particularly the local government’s control of the intimate sexual lives of the city’s residents. It discusses the emergence of a new political culture that framed homosexuality and homosexual desires as a dangerous and disturbing essence or identity. The new political culture also marked sexual deviance and gendered behavior as synonymous with the threats of moralistic fervor and Communism. It resulted in legal sanctions, arrests, imprisonments, and institutionalization—all designed to transform the meaning of homosexual desires and activity.