Preservationists are petitioning to save Washington, D.C.’s Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building, dubbed the “Sistine Chapel of New Deal Art” for the 20th-century masterpieces its houses, including murals by Philip Guston and Ben Shahn. Despite its landmark status, the Trump administration has listed the building up for sale, raising fears it could be demolished.
Living New Deal, a California-based nonprofit building a database of New Deal public artworks across America, launched a petition last week highlight the pending threat to the Wilbur Buliding, one of 45 federal buildings that the US government has listed for “accelerated disposal,” which enables the swift sale of federal properties with limited public input.
“As powerful interests move in haste to sell this historic building, we call for the process to be paused and conducted with transparency, respect, and public participation,” the petition reads, adding that “selling or privatizing this building without proper review would strip the American people of their rightful heritage and deny us any voice in the fate of our shared cultural property.”
Charles Z. Klauder—the architect behind the Yale’s Peabody Museum and the University of Pittsburgh’s Cathedral of Learning—began constructing the building in 1938. Located two blocks from the US Capitol on Independence Avenue, the building opened in 1940 under Franklin D. Roosevelt as part of the New Deal to house the Social Security Administration, then known as the Social Security Board.
The Social Security Board ultimately relocated elsewhere, but the building’s interior was decorated with artwork that reflected its mission, such as a series of Ben Shahn frescoes celebrating the sweeping social reforms that emerged from the economic ruin of the Great Depression. Philip Guston, another titan of 20th-century painting, contributed a large fresco in the auditorium memorializing the financial stability and sense of renewal that reconstruction returned to American families.
Seymour Fogel, Wealth of the Nation (1941).
Corbis via Getty Images
Four granite relief sculptures, two by German American sculptor Henry Kreis and two by Indianapolis native Emma Lu Davis, also adorn the building’s interior, along with an idyllic winter landscape by Chicago-born twin painters Ethel and Jenne Magafan. Ten artworks were created for the building between 1940 and 1942 through the New Deal’s Section of Fine Arts, a U.S. Treasury Department established to give unemployed artists work.
Since 1954, the building has been the home of the Voice of America, a US government-funded, multi-lingual news organization that broadcasted news to countries with restricted media access. The Trump administration suspended Voice of America’s news broadcasts and furloughed its journalists on October 1. Washington Monthly reported in October that President Trump was determined to sell the Wilbur building by the end of 2025.
President Trump has made the aesthetic overhaul of civic architecture a priority of his second term, frequently targeting Deconstrucivism and Brutalist landmarks. In January, he reinstated a policy from his first term that demanded federal buildings adhere to architectural styles that “respect regional heritage and align with America’s classical traditions,” including Neoclassicism, Georgian style, and the Greek Revival.
The General Services Administration, a government agency that manages federal property, has also expressed interest in selling nearly half of the 26,000 artworks and artifacts in its holdings—murals, paintings, sculptures, and environmental artworks by artists from Mark Rothko to Jacob Lawrence, and Maya Lin to Louise Nevelson. In March, more than half half of the agency’s roughly three dozen workers who cared for the collection were put on leave, pending termination.
