Florence Peto, Quilt Expert
- in Colonial Revival Index of American Design
- posted April 15, 2023
Florence Peto (1881-1970) was a renowned quilt authority who played matchmaker between great quilts and museums, lectured with a flip-chart of patterns, and talked about quilts on WNYC radio shows. She owned the quilt that this rendering from the Index of American Design presents....
Read MoreQuilts in Temporary Homes
- in Farm Security Administration
- posted August 25, 2022
In the final month before I set aside my book manuscript to start teaching, I’ve been immersed in the Farm Security Administration’s Migratory Labor Camps, federally funded temporary communities designed a radical experiment in democracy during the New Deal. Among the standard amenities were...
Read MoreIs that a painting of a quilt?
- in Index of American Design
- posted February 14, 2022
Administrators of the Federal Arts Project, a program of the WPA that employed out-of-work artists, aimed to create a systematic catalog of inspirational quilts and numerous other folkart objects, through the Index of American Design (IAD). Rather than take black and white photographs of...
Read MoreThrift and style
- in Colonial Revival
- posted June 20, 2020
A cheerful pastel pieced Broken Star quilt shows how a quiltmaker could execute a pattern with clear inspiration from the literature celebrating “colonial”-style quilts while drawing on the Depression era values of thrift and reuse. The pattern, a favorite during the 1930s that consumers...
Read MoreThe Quilting Bee and New Deal Collectivism
- in Colonial Revival Farm Security Administration
- posted June 18, 2020
In the early years of the New Deal, some federal administrators aimed to develop experiments in cooperative living and farming. In 1933 the government established the Federal Subsistence Homesteads Corporation, which created subsistence farm homestead communities. The FSA sponsored cooperative loans for its clients...
Read MoreMigrant Grandmother
- in Farm Security Administration
- posted June 11, 2020
Dorothea Lange, perhaps the most famous FSA photographer, took the most iconic Great Depression photograph, known as “Migrant Mother,” which along with the plight of the Joad family depicted in John Steinbeck’s 1939 The Grapes of Wrath, made the migrant families now working in...
Read MorePie Town
- in Farm Security Administration
- posted June 9, 2020
In 1940, Russell Lee ventured to Pie Town, New Mexico, to conduct what his Farm Security Administrator supervisor Roy Stryker called a “small town study.” Stryker sought to capture the regional differences of what he called the “American institution” of the small town, including...
Read MoreLaura Wheeler Encourages Thrift
- in Colonial Revival
- posted May 25, 2020
While many design companies published and sold mail order quilt patterns through newspaper columns, Laura Wheeler patterns were particularly popular because they encouraged the use of scraps and creative thrift, acknowledging that making a quilt an economical way was desirable. These regularly occurring features...
Read MoreA Colonial Quilting Party, for Children
- in Colonial Revival
- posted May 24, 2020
In 1937 the School District of Philadelphia offered a line drawing of an old fashioned quilting bee as a coloring sheet in its Bulletin for Teachers for grade 4, which provided source material for studying the “colonial people.” Of the colonial woman, the Bulletin...
Read MoreHarry Kaplan Makes a Quilt
- in Farm Security Administration
- posted April 10, 2020
Interestingly, photographers did not only feature women with quilts. Here Russell Lee posed Harry Kaplan, a previously unemployed garment worker, with his quilt assembled from scraps of suiting at the garment factory in Jersey Homestead, a cooperative established as part of New Deal to...
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