Edgar Holger Cahill (January 13, 1887 – July 8, 1960) was an Icelandic-American curator, writer, and arts administrator who served as the national director of the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration during the New Deal in the United States. Biography Cahill was born Sveinn Kristjan Bjarnarsson in Skógarströnd, Iceland on January 13, 1887. Cahill's Icelandic family migrated to Canada in about 1890 and then to North Dakota as homesteaders, anglicizing their name to Bjornson and eventually, Johnson, although they continued to speak Icelandic at home. Extreme poverty, lack of formal education and domestic strife marked Cahill's early childhood. When he was young, his father abandoned the family and his mother sent the young Cahill to live and work on a farm owned by an Icelandic family 50 miles away where he was mistreated. His mother remarried and had another child, Anna. That marriage also did not last. After two difficult years with the Icelandic farmers, Cahill ran away at first to neighboring farms where he found work and eventually to Winnipeg, in search of distant cousins. The cousins refused to take him in and he ended up in an orphanage. A Gaelic-speaking family in a nearby cooperative farm community adopted Cahill and he was able to attend school regularly for the first time. After several years with the Gaelic family, he returned to North Dakota in search of his mother only to discover that his mother and step-sister had moved. Eventually he found them working on a nearby tenant farm in 1902. His mother had remarried to a younger man named Samson, and she and her son quarreled. Once again, he left home and did not see his mother again for 45 years. Career Cahill's employment in the field of visual arts began in 1921 when he was hired by John Cotton Dana at the Newark Museum and the Society of Independent Artists to write publicity about their activities. As a former journalist and editor, Cahill had learned how to write effectively and he helped create new interest both organizations in the media. Through his friend, the artist John Sloan, Cahill knew many of the leading artists of the day and he encouraged Dana to purchase works by contemporary artists for the museum’s growing collection. After Dana's death in 1929, Cahill organized the first major museum surveys of American Folk Art at the Newark Museum in 1930