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Special Event: Webinar Series on CETA Arts sponsored by Living New Deal
October 3: "Reshaping the WPA for the 1970s" with CETA Arts founders John Kreidler and George Koch
October 10:"The Artist Experience" with Judy Baca (L.A. History Wall) and Colleen Hooper (Dance Historian)
October 17: "Impact on the Arts and Community" with Ted Berger (New York Foundation for Art) and Lou Bellamy (Penumbra Theater)
Attendance is free, but you must register. For information and registration CLICK HERE
CETA and Arts Employment
During the years 1974-1982, more than 10,000 artists in the U.S., and an additional 10,000 arts support staff, were given full-time
employment as part of the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA). This was the largest federally-funded artists
employment program since the New Deal in the 1930s, yet CETA has been virtually forgotten.
The purpose of the CETA Arts Legacy Project is to preserve the history of CETA's role in the arts, to make CETA's
accomplishments in the arts more widely known
and to demonstrate the relevance of
CETA as a model for government support of the cultural sector.
CETA was enacted in 1973, with bipartisan support, in the face of an economic downturn paired with high inflation.
It was a general training and employment program, not originally seen as a source of jobs for artists, but modifications to the program
in 1974 made it possible to include artists.
The first artists project was launched
in San Francisco in 1974,
to be followed by several other projects over the next several years: in Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia,
Washington DC, and other cities. The last, and largest, of the projects took place in NYC from 1978-80.
Ruth Asawa - the Alvarado Arts Workshop she co-founded in San Francisco became a model in 1974 for the CETA-funded Neighborhood Arts Program.
This strikes me as a perfectly proper marriage between government and art. We learned through our experience
with the WPA that such a union is not only possible, but fruitful . . . -- Senator Jacob Javits (R-NY) 1978
This site consists of four sections plus a shared archive of historical resources:
CETA Arts Nationwide • CETA Arts in NYC
CETA's Value as a Model for Government Support of the Cultural Sector
CETA Arts Online Research Archive (co-sponsored by Franklin & Marshall College)
Contact CETA Arts Legacy Project
updated 240915