Merry Go Round, Second Edition. Screenprint on heavy stock paper, 1940. 241x381 mm; 9½x15 inches, full margins. Titled and dated in red crayon, right center margin. Inscribed, To Mr. Carnovsky at the occasion of the auction of the Midtown Committee for the Free Public Education. Let us have bigger and better schools!! and signed in ink, lower left margin.
Olds was already a successful artist by the time she was employed by the WPA, having won the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1926. In 1933 she joined the Public Works of Art Project in Omaha and moved to New York in 1935. Though she had a foundation in illustration and painting, Olds is known as one of the pioneers of the fine art application of the screenprint while working in the Works Progress Administration's graphics division. Olds also painted a mural, "Pittsburgh", at the Queens Borough Public Library, New York, though the present location and survival of this work is unknown, as is the case with many WPA murals. After the WPA, Olds went on to publish six children's books and continued to exhibit her works.
