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Although simple and human in their approach, the program and staffs of the Southern art galleries are adapted to meet a wide variety of problems. Big Stone Gap, Virginia, is a poor community where art had always seemed as luxurious and remote as a Hispano-Suiga. The teachers of the Project are making it human - as simple as beauty of line in a geranium pot. Miami, on the other hand, is a tourist center, formerly as rich in race tracks and slot machines as it was poor in art attractions. Now a gallery with display windows on one of the main streets is attracting both tourists and local visitors.

Oklahoma City presents another distinctly American phenomenon - an 1839 boom town that grew swiftly to a population of 235,000. It wanted a civic art center, but lacked the initiative to create one. When the WPA Art Gallery was opened, there were line-ups for lectures that had to be broken through by the police in order that pedestrians might pass. In the University of Chattanooga the Federal Art Gallery gladly accepted wall space in the Cafeteria. Teachers from other states have come for conventions and gazoda at the paintings with envy. A visitor from New Hampshire even remarked: "And to think that I always believed Tennessee was a land of malaria and moon-shining hill billies!"

Quite possibly museum development in the South was delayed not only by lack of funds but by the idea that paintings and sculpture must be housed in an expensive marble building, protected by uniformed guards. The Federal Arts Projects has changed this conception. It has demonstrated that sympathetic direction, informal lectures and response to community needs can attract thousands of people to art centers. WPA art galleries have been established in Big Stone Gap, Virginia; Asheville, Winston-Salem, Raleigh and Greensboro, N.C., St. Petersburg, Jacksonville and Miami, Florida: Nashville, Chattanooga and Knoxville, Tennessee; Florence, Columbia