Join Dr. Keri Watson, Assistant Director of the School of Visual Arts and Design and Associate Professor of Art History, for a presentation about the research in her new book, Florida’s New Deal Parks and Post Office Murals.

What do the West Palm Beach Post Office's Barefoot Mailman murals and the Florida Caverns State Park in Marianna have in common? Both were funded by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal. Aimed at what the president termed "Relief, Recovery, and Reform," the New Deal affected every sector of society from banking and farming to art and architecture. This presentation takes readers on a tour of federally funded projects throughout the Sunshine State, focusing on state parks and post offices built under the auspices of the Civilian Conservation Corps, Public Works Administration, Civil Works Administration, Works Progress Administration, and Treasury Section of Painting and Sculpture.  

Keri Watson (Ph.D., Florida State University) is an award-winning curator and author of four books: Florida’s New Deal Parks and Post Office Murals (2024), Visual and Performing Arts Collaborations In Higher Education (2023), This is America: Re-Viewing the Art of the United States (2023) & the Routledge Companion of Art and Disability (2022). Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Central Florida, Keri serves on the board of the College Art Association and is Editor of Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art. Her research has been recognized and supported by a Fulbright Fellowship and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Laughing Gull Foundation, the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Henry Luce Foundation, the Wyeth Foundation for American Art, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

CHDR Presents is an ongoing talk series hosted by the Center for Humanities and Digital Research where scholars share innovative, award-winning, creative research to both showcase their work and foster collaboration. Free and open to the public.