Holger Cahill

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Holger Cahill, born Sveinn Kristján Bjarnarsson in 1887 in Iceland, was an Icelandic‑American curator, writer, and arts administrator. He is best known for leading the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration during the New Deal in the United States. His family moved from Iceland to Canada and then to North Dakota, where they anglicized their name to Bjornson and later Johnson. Cahill’s early life was hard: he faced poverty, little formal schooling, and family trouble, and he eventually spent time in an orphanage before being taken in by a Gaelic‑speaking farming family who helped him go to school.

Cahill began his career in the visual arts in 1921, writing publicity for the Newark Museum and the Society of Independent Artists. Through his friend, artist John Sloan, he encouraged the museum’s director, John Cotton Dana, to buy contemporary works for the collection. After Dana’s death in 1929, Cahill organized Newark’s first major folk‑art surveys in 1930 and 1931 and wrote art criticism and fiction for various magazines. He also published novels, including Profane Earth (1927) and A Yankee Adventurer (1930). While at Newark, he met his future wife, Dorothy Canning Miller; they married in 1938.

Cahill worked with Edith Halpert’s Downtown Gallery on several art monographs and helped launch the magazine Space in 1930. He served briefly as acting director of the Museum of Modern Art in 1932–33, organizing important exhibitions. In 1934, he directed the First Municipal Art Exhibition at Rockefeller Center, an event tied to the controversial destruction of a Diego Rivera mural.

From 1935 to 1943, Cahill was the national director of the Federal Art Project, a major part of the WPA. He built programs that supported tens of thousands of artists and craftspeople, helped establish community art centers in more than 100 towns, and funded public murals and art projects across the country. He also oversaw the Index of American Design, which documented American imagery and crafts.

In 1939, Cahill helped organize the World’s Fair survey American Art Today. When the WPA program ended in 1943, he returned to New York to write novels and essays. Illness and a heart attack in 1947 slowed him, but he continued to work on literature, producing Look South to the Polar Star (1947) and The Shadow of My Hand (1956). He studied poetry with Stanley Kunitz and recorded a memoir for the Columbia University Oral History Project. He also received a Guggenheim Fellowship to work on his novel Stone Dreamer, which remained unfinished when he died on July 8, 1960, in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where he is buried.