Two Herons for the Zoo: The WPA Woodblock Poster of 1936
Two birds stand in profile against a flat blue sky: a great blue heron in front, tall and grey, with a black crest and a long red bill, and behind it a white egret bending its neck down toward the water. Nothing else is needed. The whole invitation of the poster is in the birds' calm, and in the three words set beneath them in red, VISIT THE ZOO.
The poster was made in 1936 for the Philadelphia Zoo and printed by the Pennsylvania workshop of the Federal Art Project, the art program of the Works Progress Administration. It is a woodblock print, carved and inked by hand, and it belongs to a small family of zoo posters that the Philadelphia workshop produced in those years, each one built around a single animal rendered as boldly as the block allowed.
From the Collection
1930's WPA Era Visit The Zoo Vintage Crane Poster
The 1936 woodblock poster for the Philadelphia Zoo, printed by the Pennsylvania Federal Art Project.
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VIEW THE PRINTPrint Details
- Archival matte paper, 189 g/m², with pigment inks
- Unframed: 12″ × 18″, 20″ × 30″ or 24″ × 36″
- Framed in Black, Red Oak or White Ayous wood, ready to hang
- Printed on demand; allow 5 to 12 business days for delivery
Keep Reading
America's First Zoo
The Philadelphia Zoo had a head start on every other zoo in the country. It was chartered in 1859, the first zoo charter in the United States, though the Civil War delayed its opening until 1874. By the 1930s it was a venerable institution in Fairmount Park, and like everything else in the Depression it needed visitors. The Federal Art Project gave it a way to ask for them beautifully.
The WPA, created in 1935, put unemployed Americans to work, and its Federal Project Number One put artists, musicians, actors and writers on the payroll. The poster workshops were among its most visible inventions. Philadelphia's workshop supplied posters for the city and the state, and the zoo series, the herons, an elephant, a hippopotamus, penguins, became some of the most loved images the whole program produced.
Cut in Wood
Most WPA posters were silkscreens, but the herons were made the older way, as a woodblock print. The design is cut into the block in reverse, the raised surface is inked, and the paper takes the image under pressure. The technique explains the poster's character: the hatched white lines that model the heron's neck, the feathering suggested by a few dozen knife strokes, the way the egret's pale body is built from fine parallel cuts in a darker ground.
Woodblock also limits the palette, and the limitation is the style. Blue grey for the sky, brown and black for the tall bird, red reserved for the bill, the legs and the lettering, so that the words and the birds share one accent color and the eye travels between them. It is a Japanese influenced economy that American poster artists of the 1930s admired enormously: nothing decorative that is not also information.
The Birds Themselves
The tall bird is a great blue heron, North America's largest heron, a patient fisherman of marshes and riverbanks that stands exactly as the poster shows it, one leg down, neck folded into its S curve. The white bird is an egret, rendered smaller and set lower, its neck bent in the opposite rhythm. Together they make a study in posture: vertical and horizontal, alert and feeding, grey and white.
A zoo poster has one job, to make an animal worth a trip across town. The herons do it without spectacle. There is no cage in the picture, no crowd, no architecture, just two birds at the scale of monuments, presented with the dignity a portraitist would give a person. That seriousness is the WPA poster's signature: public art that assumed the public had good taste.
The Philadelphia Workshop
The herons were printed far from home. This Philadelphia Zoo poster was made not in New York, the WPA poster program's flagship city, but in the Pennsylvania workshop, one of the state and city poster units that the Federal Art Project maintained around the country. The Philadelphia unit had its own character, and its willingness to work in woodblock, a slower and more artisanal process than the silkscreen the New York shop championed, gave its zoo series a crafted warmth the screen prints rarely attempt.
The workshop's zoo posters were produced for a client that needed them: a Depression era zoo asking a city with little money to spend some of it on a day in Fairmount Park. That the ask was made with a hand cut woodblock, two wading birds and three words of type is some measure of what the Federal Art Project thought public communication should look like. It thought it should look like art, because the public, given art, responded to it.
Why It Survives
The poster workshops printed in the millions, and almost everything they made was pasted up, weathered and thrown away. The zoo series survived better than most because people kept them, and the Library of Congress gathered the workshop samples into what is now the national collection of WPA posters. In 2016 the U.S. Postal Service issued a booklet of stamps honoring WPA poster art, and a Philadelphia zoo poster from this same series, the hippopotamus, was among the designs chosen.
The herons remain the quietest of the series and, for many, the finest: a 1936 woodblock that still does its work at a glance, two birds and three words, an invitation nearly ninety years old that has not expired.
