The Public Works Authority funded hundreds of murals in the US during the 1930s as part of the New Deal. The Coit Tower Murals are a collection of murals made by 25 artists, some of whom had worked alongside Rivera in San Francisco during the period. The images focus on the struggles of working-class Americans and evoke the ideological battles of the time. The Coit Tower artists had demonstrated against the destruction of Rivera’s Rockefeller Center mural for containing an image of Lenin and they faced controversy over political imagery in their own work.