Women played crucial roles in the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration as artists, researchers, and administrators. This lecture focuses on the women who worked for the Index of American Design, a WPA project that celebrated early American handicrafts. Women artists developed innovative techniques for documenting those handicrafts, researched their historical significance, and organized popular exhibitions to showcase them to the public. They promoted early American textiles in particular as women’s art, and in the process they transformed public perception of the history of American art and women’s work.
Kay Wells is an Associate Professor of American Art and Architecture at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is the author of Weaving Modernism: Postwar Tapestry between Paris and New York (2019) and her next book project, Uncanny Revivals, explores the politics and aesthetics of colonial revival design in the 1930s and 1940s.
Thursday, February 23 @ 4pm