Dorothy Waugh, a pioneering Modernist designer who created the U.S. government's first in-house National Parks poster campaign during the Great Depression, is the subject of her first-ever solo exhibition at New York's Poster House. Titled "Blazing a Trail: Dorothy Waugh's National Parks Posters," the show reunites all 17 posters Waugh designed for the National Park Service between 1934 and 1936, bold experimental works that helped define a new visual language for federal design. Guest curator Mark Resnick spent three decades tracking down Waugh's story, locating documents across the National Archives, the Library of Congress, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Jones Library in Amherst, Massachusetts.
This exhibition matters because it reintroduces Waugh as a key figure in American Modernist graphic design and New Deal-era cultural history, correcting a long-standing oversight. Waugh's posters were groundbreaking not only for their Modernist aesthetic—using bold colors, abstraction, and hand-drawn lettering—but also because they were created by a solo female designer within a male-dominated federal bureaucracy. The show highlights how Waugh's work shifted National Park Service advertising from railroad-focused imagery to a broader, optimistic vision of national parks as destinations for wildlife, winter sports, and morale-boosting travel during the Great Depression.