The Art of the New Deal: Kentucky’s Contribution to the Index of American Design

Both a monograph and an exhibition at the Frazier History Museum in Louisville, Kentucky by Design catalogs the objects collected in Depression-era Kentucky, and the watercolor illustrations made of them, for the Index of American Design, a project of the Works Progress Administration. The Index, a heretofore largely forgotten program of the New Deal, was intended to record each state’s contributions to the country’s collective material history. The project that inspired “Kentucky by Design” began decades ago when Louisville attorney Allan Weiss transferred his passion for Kentucky’s musical history, born of the folk movement of the 1960s, to the state’s visual culture and determined to retrace the original objects illustrated in Kentucky’s portion of the Index. This research became a lifetime avocation, culminating in a 2012 meeting with the Frazier staff and the subsequent planning of the current exhibition, in which a photograph of the original watercolor rendering of the object executed eighty years ago for the Index flanks the object itself, if it has been located, or a similar example.

The Index of American Design was a product of the Federal Art Project (FAP), an agency of the Works Progress Administration, the largest program of the New Deal tasked with putting Americans back to work during the Great Depression. Like the other programs of the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration that married the dignity of labor to the sublimity of art, under the FAP formerly out-of-work artists fanned across the country creating public art murals and sculpture, paintings, posters, graphic work, and photographs. And like other employment initiatives of the time that built American roads, sewers, parks, and bridges, the FAP offered ancillary benefits in building American cultural infrastructure, such as museums, community arts programs, and the Index itself. For President Franklin D. Roosevelt, all these programs boosted employment and helped rebuild the self-confidence he believed Americans needed to claw their way out of the Depression. The administrators of the FAP, and, specifically, the Index, held similarly ambitious goals and they, too, achieved varying degrees of success in these endeavors.

Several well-written essays appearing in the text of Kentucky by Design trace the origins of the Index and its role in documenting Kentucky’s artistic heritage and cultural contributions to the national visual canon. Two women—a textile designer and a photograph artist—proposed the registry of objects to reflect the history of American design and to create an American grammar of arts in the vein of European models that would promote only what was uniquely American in the nation’s aesthetic. It is worth noting that this call for productive self-reflection was hardly the first. In the midst of the Great Depression, some Americans echoed the appeal raised a century earlier by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Andrew Jackson Downing, and other American chauvinists to break with European influence and create an American culture rooted in the country’s republican values. As the essays in the book delineate, New Deal cultural commentators similarly interested in American artistic exceptionalism influenced the direction of the Index that FAP director Holger Cahill adopted for national implementation. Cahill was a specialist in modern and American folk art, and, despite his background in the avant garde, he was looking for a selection of more mundane, utilitarian objects for the Index to capture what Madeleine Burnside, Frazier History Museum director, calls in her introduction to the text “the Americanness of America” (1). Because they were looking for solid draftsmen to record accurate facsimiles, not fanciful works of art in themselves, Index administrators retained commercial, not fine, artists to render the furniture, textiles, musical instruments, grooming implements, and toys they collected state by state. Each artifact was cataloged with its pertinent details, including any...