Many FAP artists adopted Social Realism in their work, a movement that aligned politically and stylistically with their radical viewpoints.
They viewed printmaking as a medium to educate the American public about the need for social change. In this section, Regionalism and Social Realism overlap, with toiling workers superimposed upon rural landscapes. Harry Gottlieb depicted coal pickers as the detritus of the industrial world: thin, stooped, and disenfranchised. The figures in Arthur Rothstein’s FSA photograph Picking Cotton, Mississippi are similarly stooped and disempowered. Unlike other depictions of labor in FAP prints, these images contextualize laborers in their work environments.
