Grand Canyon National Park WPA Poster, 1938

The story of this poster

The Grand Canyon sheet is the most painterly of the Ranger Naturalist Service posters. Don Powell built the canyon out of stacked terraces of flat colour — a pink and mauve that no photograph of the place quite matches, ochre ledges, a green rim — and let the strata run off the top of the sheet under a pink sky. The lettering at the bottom is unusually plain for the series: the naturalist programme is “a free government service,” and that is the whole pitch.

It was silkscreened in 1938 at the WPA Federal Art Project’s Western Museum Laboratories in Berkeley for the park’s visitor buildings, in the same small hand-pulled edition as the other sheets. Originals are rare; this one belongs to the Library of Congress, which scanned it at 300 dpi.

The inks on this design fade unevenly — the pinks go first — and the archive copy shows some of that, along with edge wear and the usual creases. We have rebalanced the colours to sit together as they were printed and cleaned the dust from the flat fields, and left the object’s age otherwise alone.

Printed to order on archival matte paper, framed in the country of delivery, and offered only at sizes that fit the sheet exactly.

Before and after

Left: the archive scan exactly as published. Right: the file that goes to the printer.

Archive scanRestored

Restoration notes

Restoration: trimmed the mount board and scanner margins, balanced levels while keeping the silkscreen's flat inks and paper tone (90% of the original colour retained), removed dust and specks, and applied gentle sharpening. Creases, edge wear and registration slips of the original screen printing are kept where they belong to the object; nothing is redrawn.

Every print carries its archive credit on the packing slip. Paper tone and small imperfections of the original are kept on purpose; nothing is redrawn.