Zion National Park WPA Poster, 1939

The story of this poster

Between 1938 and 1941 a small studio of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project, working out of the Western Museum Laboratories in Berkeley, California, silkscreened a series of posters for the National Park Service. Fourteen designs are known. They were pulled by hand in runs of perhaps a hundred, pinned up in ranger stations and hotel lobbies to advertise the free naturalist programmes, and then thrown away when the season ended. Only a few dozen originals survive; this one is in the Library of Congress.

The Zion sheet, dated 1939, is the most vertical composition in the set. The Great White Throne fills it from the canyon floor to the top margin, rendered in five or six flat inks — the cream face of the Navajo sandstone, a mauve shadow, the green of the cottonwoods and piñon along the Virgin River, and a sky laid down in horizontal bands of blue. The lettering is the studio’s own condensed sans-serif, and the Park Service arrowhead sits in the bottom margin between the two agency names.

The posters were rediscovered in the 1970s, when a seasonal ranger found an original in a barn at Grand Teton and spent years tracking down the rest of the series; they have been reprinted, imitated and redrawn ever since. This is not a redrawing. It is the original 1939 impression, with the creases and edge wear of a poster that hung in a park building, scanned at 300 dpi by the Library of Congress and restored for print.

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