Against our nature: The deception of progress in Tennessee Valley murals

This thesis focuses on Depression-Era murals within the Tennessee Valley to show how modernization, as carried out by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), was both naturalized and promoted by Section-sponsored art. My analysis of the murals is categorized into three themes: Regionalist history painting, TVA's unified development, and David Nye's notion of the "technological sublime." These coded categories are used to analyze a mural in Huntsville, Alabama entitled TVA by Xavier Gonzales. In these murals modernization is displayed through progress narratives, but artists rarely depicted the cost of such movement forward. Displacement, alienation, dehumanization, and unfair competition are downplayed in favor of artists' favorable view of the TVA's deferred benefits. The murals produced were not the result of top-down collusion between the two agencies. Instead the artists generally buy in to the TVA program on their own. For this reason, the murals produced are a kind of unofficial propaganda.