During the Great Depression of the 1930s, American artists were as hard-hit as any single group. Not only did the greater American public perceive painting and sculpture as unnecessary to the survival and well-being of the country, the arts were seen as politically subversive and decadent, if not downright un-American. The Works Progress Administration, backed by President Franklin Roosevelt under his New Deal programs, changed all that.

Launched in May 1935, the WPA employed thousands of American artists, writers, musicians, and actors. For the first time in this country’s history, large groups of painters and sculptors, often working together on major projects such as public murals, were guaranteed jobs and paychecks. No longer burdened by unpaid bills and empty stomachs, artists could afford to buy materials and to spend time in their studios; but, of nearly equal importance, they could afford to get away from the isolation of those studios — to meet after work in cafés and bars to socialize and to argue about art.

Those dialogues led to camaraderie, solidarity, and the founding of groups such as the American Abstract Artists and the “Ten.” They also inspired heated disagreements and polarization regarding abstract vs. representational art; Stalinists vs. Trotskyites; American art vs. that of Europe. The WPA provided a lifeline that almost single-handedly gave birth to the New York art world, which, 15 years later, would supplant that of Paris as the art capital of the world.

Under the WPA’s Federal Art Project, thousands of murals were commissioned to adorn this country’s government buildings, including high schools and post offices, as well as hospitals, housing projects, colleges, music halls, night clubs, and museums. “For the People: American Mural Drawings of the 1930s and 1940s,” which opens tomorrow at Vassar College’s Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., focuses on the flowering of American mural painting.

Curated by Patricia Phagan, the show comprises some 30 drawings, paintings, and sketchbooks used in preparation for public murals. It also includes a small fresco mural fragment and photographs of the paintings in progress and of the completed works in situ, which often differ greatly from the studies.

Many of these artists will be unfamiliar to the general public, but their sentiments and drawing styles will feel very close to home. The majority, many of whom in this show were illustrators and cartoonists themselves, looked to the cartoons and illustrations in contemporary American journals. This gives the much of works on view an illustrative, at times cartoony feel in both their subject matter and execution.

Not surprisingly, almost all of the murals in the show are representational and illustrative. Most of the show’s murals reflect a particularly American taste: faith in democracy and national identity; in acknowledging and righting our wrongs; in fostering American traditions, history, and culture, and in the embrace of an easily accessible American realism that is ours alone. Think of Norman Rockwell, Social Realism, Diego Rivera, and Thomas Hart Benton all thrown together; now add a bit Cubist and Surrealist inflection and Art Deco flair to spice things up, and you get the general flavor of the works on view.

The exhibit overall is not thrilling. Works by Rockwell Kent, Judson Smith, and Ben Shahn are rather tame. William de Kooning’s “Self Portrait (With Gull and Nautical Themes)” (c. 1941), depicting the lone, shirtless artist standing in the wind on a pier, looking up at a gull, is a strong reminder of his beginnings as a commercial artist.

Typical is Andrée Ruellan’s “Entry for Forty-Eight State Mural Competition for Mural (Unexecuted) in Delhi, New York, Post Office” (1939), a farm scene depicting children and animals that looks as if it came straight out of “Dick and Jane.” Anton Refregier’s series “Competition Entry for Mural Series, Rincon Annex of the San Francisco Post Office” (1941), consists of drawings that depict the plight of Chinese workers, concentration camp victims, and slaves, as well as those who perished in 1846 at Donner Pass, alongside American settlers and prospectors.

Or, of the darker, film noir variety, is Milton Bellin’s illustrative “Office Scene: Study for Mural, Teachers College of Connecticut (Central Connecticut State University), New Britain” (1940), a dreamy, somewhat erotic, blackand-white drawing of women daydreaming as they practice office skills.

The single exception to illustrative representation in the exhibit is a nearly abstract design by Arshile Gorky, “Study for Entry for Mural (Unexecuted), Marine Transportation Building New York World’s Fair” (c. 1939). Conceived as part of a mural for the dining room of a ship, the painting is a biomorphic mixture of abstract marine forms and symbols, as well as an oddly out-of-place, representational ship. It is one of the more engaging and colorful works in the exhibit.

Although the Neoplasticist Burgoyne Diller was in charge of the WPA’s division of mural painting, only one in 10 commissions was awarded to abstract artists, because he knew that abstract public art would be largely unapproved. “Gorky’s final design was rejected,” Ms. Phagan writes in the catalog, “in favor of a more conventional one by Lyonel Feininger.” The most exciting works in the show are drawings by James Daugherty and Marion Greenwood, respectively. Daugherty, influenced by the early Cubist works of Robert Delaunay, created jazzinspired drawings for murals at the Stamford High School, in Stamford, Conn. Made up of crowded, sectioned-off areas of people elbow-to-elbow, the drawings are a jumble, raucous and alive.

Greenwood, who was influenced by her friend Diego Rivera, is represented in the exhibit by her beautiful studies for murals in Mexico City, and is the great surprise of this show. Her drawings, which here are dark, dense, silvery, and lush, depict the plight of Mexican natives under the industrialization of the countryside. Never heavy-handed, Greenwood’s mural studies, drawn from life and then pieced together into panoramas, are fluid and rich, intimate yet epic. Her figures feel buried in the earth, naturally struggling and interwoven, as if they were roots or stems.

“For the People” can at times come across as overly nostalgic, sentimental, sermonizing, or idealistic. And yet the show, a concentrated look at our not-too-distant past, reflects a then not-too-distant future that these artists imagined was possible for us. That future never quite came to pass, but that does not mean it is not worth revisiting or that it was not worth imagining in the first place.

Tomorrow through March 11 (124 Raymond Ave., Poughkeepsie, N.Y., 845-437-5632).