The Promise and Perils of Public Art: Ben Shahn’s Murals on Social Security

Join Professor Laura Katzman as she discusses the public art of Ben Shahn (1898-1969), focusing on his most prominent New Deal fresco murals, The Meaning of Social Security, which were commissioned by the Public Works Agency’s Section of Fine Arts (1940-1942) for the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building in Washington, DC. Dr. Katzman will address how Shahn navigated the demands of federal agencies, the needs of his own art and activism, and the larger goals of his social criticism. The program will illuminate the status of Shahn’s murals in the context of the current administration’s controversial efforts to sell specific government buildings and its drastic staff cuts to the General Services Administration—the official steward of federally funded art in government buildings across the United States.Katzman’s lecture will be accompanied by a conversation with former director of the U.S. General Services Administration’s Center for Fine Arts, Jennifer Gibson.Presented in partnership with the DC Preservation League and Moment Magazine.ABOUT THE SPEAKERSLaura Katzman is a professor of art history at James Madison University, and has served as the Terra Foundation Professor of American Art at the Free University Berlin. An internationally recognized scholar of documentary photography in the United States and Puerto Rico, Dr. Katzman has co-authored numerous publications, including Ben Shahn’s New York: The Photography of Modern Times (2000), Re-viewing Documentary: The Photographic Life of Louise Rosskam (2014), and The Museum of the Old Colony: An Art Installation by Pablo Delano (2023). Her most recent book, Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity (2025), accompanied the eponymous and highly acclaimed retrospective that she curated for the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid (2023-2024) and adapted for the Jewish Museum in New York (2025).Jennifer Gibson recently retired as the director of the U.S. General Services Administration’s Center for Fine Arts where she was responsible for the policy, oversight, and management of the Fine Arts Collection and Art in Architecture program. The collection includes over 27,000 artworks dating from the 1850s to the present. These artworks are permanently installed in federal buildings, U.S. courthouses, and land ports of entry throughout the country or are on loan to public institutions. The center commissions new artworks through the Art in Architecture program. Gibson joined GSA as a project manager for Art in Architecture and then assumed responsibility for the Fine Arts Program. Subsequently she established and became director of the Center for Fine Arts which combined the two programs and resulted in a more seamless process for the commissioning of new artworks and long-term care of GSA’s Fine Arts Collection. She currently serves as a member of the Federal Reserve Board Collections Panel.Prior to GSA, Gibson directed the visual arts program for the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission, a regional government agency, where she curated exhibitions, lectured on art, established art outreach programs, and developed a public art program. She has taught art history, served on the board of Pyramid Atlantic was chair of the art advisory board at the University of Maryland, University College, and sat on numerous advisory boards, juries, and artist selection panels. She earned a Ph.D. in art history at the University of Virginia, and was a pre-doctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Institution.Image credits:Laura Katzman, Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, October 21, 2023. Photo by Olive SantosBen Shahn, Housing, from The Meaning of Social Security, 1940-42, fresco secco. Photo courtesy of Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress