[4]: 85  Other artists who later joined the union included Balcomb Greene and his wife Gertrude, Ibram Lassaw, Michael Loew and Mark Rothko.

[3] A magazine, Art Front, was published from November 1934, initially in collaboration with the Artists Committee of Action, which had formed to protest the destruction by Nelson Rockefeller of Diego Rivera's mural Man at the Crossroads earlier that year.

[3] The Union – together with the Artists' Committee of Action, the International Labor Defense, the John Reed Club, the League of Struggle for Negro Rights and the Vanguard group of Louise Thompson and Augusta Savage – organized the second of the two 1935 New York anti-lynching exhibitions.

[6]: 338 When the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration was set up in August 1935, the good conditions offered to artists, including the relatively high pay rate, were largely a consequence of pressure by the Union.

The administration was conceived as a temporary response to an emergency, but the Artists Union strongly opposed any attempt to reduce its scope.

These and other tactics delayed but did not prevent the progressive reduction of the Federal Art Project, and the influence of the Union began to decline.