Hugh Stevenson
Artwork: Visit the Zoo, 1936–37
Hugh Stevenson was a designer in the Philadelphia workshop of the Federal Art Project, the WPA’s art programme — and one of the few WPA poster artists whose name survives on the record, in a field where most work went unsigned and was credited to the Project itself.
His Visit the Zoo poster, dated 1936 to 1937, reduces an elephant to pure graphic design: frontal and symmetrical, a deep ultramarine blue on a yellow-green field, the ears and cream tusks mirrored around the hanging trunk. It was made for the Philadelphia Zoo, in the same workshop series as a carved-woodblock heron poster — one workshop, two temperaments. The Library of Congress copy carries a verso date stamp of August 4, 1937.
The works
Read the story: The Blue Elephant: Hugh Stevenson's Visit the Zoo Poster