SPAM's mission is to increase knowledge and understanding in two distinct areas of the arts: the work by artists known collectively as the American modernists, and the history of public and private support for the arts.

This coupling of themes was inspired by an American modernist painter, Harold Weston (1894-1972), who painted murals for the New Deal arts projects in the 1930s and understood first-hand the importance of financial assistance for artists. Later, when he ran the National Council on the Arts and Government from 1954 to 1970, he fought doggedly for legislation small and great, from discount postage privileges for sheet music to the creation of the National Endowment for the Arts in 1965.

Weston's dual interests as a painter and humanitarian typify the modernist conflict. His humanitarian impulse grew from the modern belief that society could be improved in rational ways. Yet the artist in him reacted against the diminishing importance of the metaphysical. Many American modernists like Weston, consciously or unconsciously, rekindled awareness of the transcendent, spiritual or Romantic in their art. Mediating between these forces of rationalism and idealism, Weston's career illuminates a dynamic that is important to understanding early modernism.

SPAM strives to honor artists like Weston by taking up both of these themes in a spirit of scholarship and discovery.

For more on Weston visit the Harold Weston Foundation. http://www.haroldweston.org.

The Society for the Preservation of American Modernists, Inc. was incorporated in New York State in 1993 and received 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status from the Internal Revenue Service in 1994.