By Kate Eagen Johnson
LOUISVILLE, KY. — “I worked on this for 30 years and now it has come to fruition. It was my idea, I did the research and the Frazier Museum picked it up and put it all together.” American folk art collector and researcher Allan Weiss described how his “personal odyssey” to learn about the inner workings and artistic output of the Works Progress Administration’s Index of American Design project in Kentucky had involved decades of sleuthing. As a major aspect of his study, he set out to find the very artifacts that artists had depicted in their graphite and watercolor renderings for the Index. “Kentucky by Design: The Decorative Arts and American Culture” is the noteworthy outcome of his mission.
On view at the Frazier History Museum through February 12, the exhibition showcases more than 100 examples of works on paper, decorative art, musical instruments, costume and tools drawn from some 20 public and private collections. The display of select Index of American Design renderings created in Kentucky juxtaposed with the actual model objects or near equivalents is one of its special features. A companion catalog was published in 2015.
Active from 1936 to 1942, the Index of American Design was part of the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) Federal Art Project. Officials devised it not only as a way to employ out-of-work artists during the Depression, but also as a vehicle for documenting historical design of significance and for ascertaining what was distinctive about the nation’s craft traditions. Thirty-five states and the District of Columbia participated. The resulting visual archive, now in the collection of the National Gallery of Art, contains approximately 18,000 renderings, with more than 200 of these created by George V. Vezolles, Orville A. Carroll and other artists assigned to the Kentucky project.
As Weiss, a Louisville mediator and arbitrator, related in conversation and in the catalog foreword, he was introduced to this important arts resource through Clarence Peterson Hornung’s Treasury of American Design and Antiques: A Pictorial Survey of Popular Folk Arts Based Upon Watercolor Renderings in the Index of American Design at the National Gallery of Art. Weiss explained that when he started collecting folk art, this publication “was my Albert Sack’s Fine Points of Furniture: Early American, my ‘good, better, best.’ It was the way I looked at a weathervane, a piece of pottery or a trade sign. And it is still the only written source where you get a picture of the whole Index.”
In the estimation of Weiss, the Index of American Design never received proper recognition. He noted that the renderings were not shared broadly at the time of their creation. Exhibitions were few and, beyond a significant one mounted at Marshall Field’s department store in Chicago, limited in size. Federal Art Project director Holger Cahill’s dream of publishing a series of design portfolios did not come to pass, undoubtedly due in part to the outbreak of World War II.
In his quest to track down the objects appearing in the Kentucky renderings, Weiss turned to the documentary data sheets that Index of American Design artists were instructed to fill out for each object illustrated. Weiss uncovered data sheets for about half of the Kentucky renderings in the National Gallery of Art’s files. Using information about makers and owners contained on the data sheets, Weiss applied the research skills he had developed as an attorney to locate model artifacts.
He searched through wills, probate inventories and other resources and made investigatory road trips. By the end of the process, he could proudly report, “I found about 80 percent of the artifacts identified with an institution or an individual.” Interestingly, museums where Index of American Design artists had labored possessed no institutional memory of their visits and staff members were largely unaware that collection objects had been so enshrined until contacted by Weiss. In 2012, he approached the Frazier History Museum with the concept for the exhibition and his body of research.
Penelope Peavler, president and chief executive officer of the Frazier History Museum, stated, “‘Kentucky by Design’ is the first single-state look at the Index of American Design and the exhibition and catalog mark the 80th anniversary of the Index.” She further shared how the Frazier wanted to celebrate the Index within the WPA and to highlight Kentucky’s participation in it. Brigid Muldoon, chief curator of the Frazier and the curator responsible for the exhibition, noted, “This is the Frazier History Museum’s first foray into decorative arts” and that the project team focused on what was unique and important to Kentucky as well as on Kentucky’s connections to the great national project.
Particularly over the last 15 years, the nexus of folk art, Shakeriana, Modernism and the Index of American Design has been a ripe subject for examination. Connections have been explored through such exhibitions as “Drawing on America’s Past: Folk Art, Modernism and the Index of American Design” at the National Gallery of Art (2002–03); “Folk Art and American Modernism” mounted at Cooperstown’s Fenimore Art Museum and the American Folk Art Museum (2014–15); and “Making It Modern: The Folk Art Collection of Elie and Viola Nadelman” at the New-York Historical Society this summer and traveling to the Addison Gallery of American Art this fall.
Pertinent publications include Elizabeth Stillinger’s A Kind of Archeology: Collecting American Folk Art 1876–1976 (2011) and William D. Moore’s “‘You’d Swear They Were Modern’: Ruth Reeves, the Index of American Design, and the Canonization of Shaker Material Culture,” in Winterthur Portfolio (Spring 2013). The “Kentucky by Design” exhibition and catalog add a state-focused case study to this body of scholarship.
Erika Doss — professor at Notre Dame, contributing author to the catalog and self-proclaimed cheerleader for this project, which she considers visionary — told how administrators such as Adele Brandeis, the supervisor of the WPA’s Federal Art Project in Kentucky, wanted to show a more positive picture of the Bluegrass State than was prevalent at the time.
As Doss relates in her essay “Regional Reputations, Modern Tastes and Cultural Nationalism: Kentucky and the Index of American Design, 1936–1942,” “The kind of art that was chosen and the thorough manner in which it was rendered helped shape and direct Kentucky’s image and identity during the era of the Great Depression. This was a matter of some concern since movies about moonshine stills in the southern Appalachians, newspaper accounts of illegal gambling busts in riverfront towns like Covington and Newport, and investigative reports about vicious labor disputes in Kentucky’s coalfields made the state seem unusually lawless and violent.… Kentucky’s drawings for the Index of American Design offered an alternative image.… By linking Kentucky with Shaker style [as an example], the Index helped recuperate and revise the state’s reputation on more orderly, industrious and modern terms.”
Asked about Index administrators’ interest in documenting the material culture of alternative religious groups, Doss reflected in conversation that “people like the Shakers were makers and doers. They were never sitting still, but were always sewing and whittling. By contrast, many Americans during the 1930s were sitting still. They did not have work and were literally depressed. Because of that, they were very interested in creativity and production. The objects made by these religious craftspeople resonated during the 1930s in ways beyond fine design.”
Objects chosen to represent Kentucky in the Index were not all manufactured in the commonwealth, and even within the grouping of objects that possessed Kentucky origins, the compilation was neither even-handed nor comprehensive. In her catalog introduction, Madeleine Burnside, former executive director of the Frazier, observed, “If this was not even a true survey of what each state had to offer, what was it? It was, in fact, the product of one stream of cultural thinking within a modernist ethos. This stream was one that emphasized nationalism and anti-European sentiment and sought out authentic Americana, albeit with shortsighted exceptions.”
Index artists working in Kentucky documented the products of local coverlet weavers and stoneware potters, Shaker woodworkers and rug makers, but not Kentuckian long-rifle gunsmiths nor African American cane makers.
Those associated with “Kentucky by Design” want exhibition visitors and catalog readers to be aware of the backstory of desires, preferences and prejudices that shaped the contents of the Index in Kentucky and to imagine what a survey of American design would look like if made today. To bring a contemporary flavor to this historical theme, curator Muldoon has invited local artists to select objects and write supporting statements explaining why these items should be included in an Index of American Design.
A central feature of “Kentucky by Design” is the opportunity to compare and contrast the model objects with Index renderings. Some artists were extremely faithful in their portrayals, while others took license. Visitors are bound to find this “exercise in seeing” both engrossing and satisfying.
The accompanying catalog contains essays by Erika Doss, Jerrold Hirsch and Jean M. Burks. Also to be found in the volume are object entries written by 14 authors; transcriptions of interviews with Adele Brandeis, Holger Cahill and Edith Gregor Halpert concerning the Index; an excerpted version of The Index of American Design Manual (1938) and a checklist of renderings made in Kentucky.
This revealing exploration of Kentucky’s experience with the Index of American Design can serve as a prototype for similar studies centered on other states. As Allan Weiss modestly reflected, “I hope that ‘Kentucky by Design’ will be a template for others to follow. I would be happy to talk to anybody to help them get started. It is not complicated. It just takes perseverance.”
An academic symposium featuring Doss, Hirsch, Burks and others is planned for Friday, September 16.
The Frazier History Museum is at 829 West Main Street. For information, 502-753-5663 or fraziermuseum.org.
