Last updated October 2, 2026
The history of WPA posters starts in 1935, when the Works Progress Administration put unemployed artists to work. Between 1936 and 1943 its poster divisions produced about 35,000 designs and printed over two million copies. The national park posters came from one small lab in Berkeley, California, which silkscreened 100 copies each for 16 parks and monuments between 1938 and 1941.
What the WPA was, and why it printed posters
The Works Progress Administration was a New Deal relief agency created in 1935 under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Most of its money went to roads, bridges and public buildings, but a slice went to Federal Project Number One, set up in July 1935, which included the Federal Art Project. The idea was simple: an unemployed painter or illustrator is still a worker, so pay them to make useful art. Posters were the most useful art of all. They announced health campaigns, adult-education classes, theatre nights, travel and safety rules, and they could be printed by the hundred.
According to the Library of Congress, which holds the largest surviving collection at 907 posters, the program ran from 1936 to 1943 and by 1938 had poster divisions in at least eighteen states, with the biggest shops in New York City, Chicago and Philadelphia. Of the two million posters printed, only about 2,000 are known to survive. That ratio, one in a thousand, is the first reason the style feels rare today even though it was once everywhere.
If you want the modern catalogue rather than the back story, our guide to the best national park posters compares all 11 series we print, WPA style among them.
The Berkeley lab that made the national park posters
The park posters were not made in New York. They came out of the Western Museum Laboratories (WML) in Berkeley, California, a National Park Service workshop that built dioramas, exhibits and signs for western parks. The NPS History Collection traces it to April 1937, when the Field Division of Education became the WML under Dorr G. Yeager, and records the WPA-funded poster work from August 1938 until the project officially ended on July 29, 1941.
The lab's monthly reports give an unusually exact timeline. Each design was a run of about 100 printed posters, billed at $12 per hundred, or 12 cents a sheet. Some parks got two versions, one with a blank block for printing ranger-program schedules and one without. Below is the order the parks came off the screens, from the WML reports quoted by the NPS.
| Park or monument | Printed | Known original copies |
|---|---|---|
| Grand Teton | August 1938 | 3 |
| Grand Canyon | November 1938 | 5 |
| Wind Cave | December 1938 | — |
| Glacier | January–February 1939 | — |
| Zion | February–March 1939 | 2 |
| Yosemite | February–April 1939 | 1 |
| Yellowstone (Falls) | March–April 1939 | 1 |
| Fort Marion, Saguaro | July–August 1939 | 2 (Fort Marion) |
| Lassen Volcanic | August–September 1939 | — |
| Yellowstone (Old Faithful) | September–October 1939 | — |
| Mount Rainier | January 1940 | 6 |
| Great Smoky Mountains, Petrified Forest | April–May 1940 | 1 (Petrified Forest) |
| Bandelier | March–April 1941 | — |
| Rocky Mountain | June 1941 | — |
Source: NPS History Collection, "50 Nifty Finds #39: An NPS Art Factory." Dashes mean the NPS article gives no count.
Who drew them is still partly a mystery. Three names surface in the records: Elmer Duffield, listed as "NPS printer" in the 1940 census; Dale Miller, traditionally credited as printer and probably the "DM" on the Lassen poster; and C. Don Powell, a commercial artist at the lab from July 1937 to August 1939 who is often called the principal designer, though the NPS notes his documented assignments rule him out for at least seven of the posters. No poster carries a full signature.
How a silkscreen poster was made, step by step
The look of a WPA poster is a direct result of how it was printed. Silkscreen, or serigraphy, was adapted for the poster divisions by Anthony Velonis in New York in 1936, and the Berkeley lab used the same method. The NPS holds six staff photographs of the park poster series in production, which break the job into these steps:
- Preliminary design — a small sketch settling the view, the horizon line and the title band.
- Completed color design — the sketch painted at full size in flat, separated colors. Every color would need its own screen, so designers kept to roughly four to eight.
- Stencil cutting — one lacquer film stencil cut by hand for each color.
- Stencil application — each stencil adhered to silk stretched over a hinged wooden frame.
- Registration — the card stock pinned against stops so every color landed in the same place, sheet after sheet.
- Printing and drying — oil paint pulled across the screen with a squeegee, one color at a time, 100 sheets per color, then racked to dry before the next pass.
Those constraints explain the style. Because each color is a separate pass, there are no soft gradients, no photographic detail, no fine hatching. Shapes are simplified into planes, shadows become a second flat tone, and the sky is often a single color. Lettering is cut as a stencil too, which is why WPA type is heavy, geometric and widely spaced. The result reads from across a room, which is what a poster pinned to a ranger-station bulletin board needed to do.
Anatomy of the WPA look (and how modern prints echo it)
Lay an original next to a modern print and five features line up. First, a picture panel above a title band: the landscape fills roughly the top two-thirds, the park name sits below in capitals. Second, a limited flat palette, usually one warm, one cool, one dark and one light. Third, a single hero landmark: Old Faithful, Delicate Arch, the Watchman, one thing you can name. Fourth, a foreground frame of pines, boulders or cactus leading the eye in. Fifth, an institutional block, originally the words "National Park Service" or a schedule panel, now usually the park's state, coordinates and founding year.
Our vintage WPA wall art covers all 63 US national parks in three families that each borrow a different piece of the original formula. The WPA Style series keeps the cream margin, the slab-serif title band and a state-and-coordinates line, so a set of ten hangs as one matched row. The Vintage Travel series prints full bleed with the founding date across the top, closer to the 1930s railway and airline posters that shared the same screens. The Screen Print tribute series reproduces the schedule-block idea with a ranger-program panel in the corner, which is the detail most collectors associate with the Berkeley originals.
One honest difference: the originals were hand-pulled oil paint on card and the modern prints are archival pigment ink on matte paper or canvas. The ink is more lightfast than the 1930s paint, which is partly why the originals faded on bulletin boards and ours will not. A side-by-side of WPA against mid-century and watercolor treatments of the same parks shows the difference at a glance; the full style table is in Best National Park Posters.
Why only about 40 originals survive
The park posters were designed to be disposable. They went up in visitor centers, ranger stations and chambers of commerce, faded in the sun, and were replaced. The NPS records copies pinned to bulletin boards, weathered outdoors and even cut up to make file-drawer dividers. When the WML closed its poster work in 1941 and staff moved on, some employees took copies home; a few of those were donated back to park museums decades later. Today the NPS counts only about 40 surviving park posters across all designs. For Yosemite, Yellowstone Falls and Petrified Forest, a single copy each is known.
The revival came in the 1990s. Photographs in the NPS History Collection, plus the handful of surviving sheets, let printers reconstruct the 14 then-known designs and sell silkscreen reproductions. Later archival work in the WML monthly reports turned up posters no one remembered, including Saguaro and Rocky Mountain, pushing the count to 16. That rediscovery is why the WPA look became the default visual language for national park gifts and why, nearly 90 years on, new parks like New River Gorge (2020) get drawn in a 1930s style they never had.
Living with the style today
Because the originals were made to be read from across a room, WPA-style prints work best where you see them from a distance: above a sofa, at the end of a hallway, over a desk. A few practical notes from hanging them in our own mockups.
Pairs and rows. The cream border and matching title band mean two or three prints from the same series read as a set even if the parks are a thousand miles apart. Keep the frames identical and the gap a hand-width. Our step-by-step gallery wall guide covers spacing and height for rows of three.
Orientation. The 1938–41 originals were all portrait. Most of our WPA-style prints keep that 2:3 shape in 13 sizes from 8 x 12 inches to 30 x 40 inches, but the panoramic series flips to 3:2 for walls that are wider than they are tall. The horizontal wall art collection gathers those, and the size guide has the inch and centimeter chart for sofa and bed widths.
Frames. The original posters were pinned, never framed. In a home, thin light oak keeps the 1930s warmth; black makes the flat colors pop on a white wall. Paper prints start at $26 for 8 x 12 inches, matte canvas from $64 for 12 x 16 inches, and framed canvas is ready to hang. Prints are made to order in 3 to 5 business days, shipping is free in the US and $5 elsewhere, and two prints take 7% off at checkout automatically, three or more take 10%. If the print is a gift for someone who hikes these parks, our hiker gift guide matches parks to the person.
Our recommendations
Four WPA-style prints of parks that never had a 1930s poster, drawn in the Berkeley lab's formula.
Sequoia National Park Giant Sequoia WPA Style
Paper from $26
Katmai National Park Brown Bears Fishing WPA Style
Paper from $26
New River Gorge National Park Bridge WPA Style
Paper from $26
White Sands National Park Soaptree Yucca WPA Style
Paper from $26
Browse the full US national parks wall art collection to pair any of these with your own park.
FAQ
What does WPA stand for on a poster?
Works Progress Administration, the New Deal agency created in 1935. Its Federal Art Project ran poster divisions from 1936 to 1943 that produced about 35,000 designs and printed over two million posters.
How many original WPA national park posters were made?
The Western Museum Laboratories in Berkeley printed designs for 16 parks and monuments between August 1938 and July 1941, about 100 copies each. Only around 40 original park posters are known to survive today.
Who designed the WPA national park posters?
No poster is fully signed. The National Park Service names Elmer Duffield, Dale Miller and C. Don Powell as the lab staff most likely involved, with initials DM and EM appearing on a few sheets.
Are modern WPA-style national park prints copies of the originals?
Ours are new drawings in the same visual language: picture panel over title band, flat limited palette, one hero landmark. The 1930s lab only covered 16 parks; we cover all 63 in the same style.
Why do WPA posters use so few colors?
Each color needed its own hand-cut stencil and a separate pass of oil paint through the screen, so designers kept to roughly four to eight flat colors. That constraint is what gives the posters their bold, graphic look.
