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.

About the Exhibition:WAM’s exhibition is the first comprehensive retrospective of her work. It begins with black-and-white images made for the 1929 Riverside High School yearbook. The exhibition includes early social realism for the Work Progress Administration (WPA), textile designs, and numerous still lifes. Most of the exhibition features Grotenrath’s invention of a unique, personal art, for which she is known and remembered.

Open Now – March 31, 2023

About WAM: The Warehouse Art Museum (WAM) is located at 1635 W. St. Paul Ave, Milwaukee. Exhibitions, performances, and lectures are based on The Warehouse Art Museum’s permanent collection of over 7,300 modern and contemporary works on paper, paintings, photography and sculpture. The collection is available for scholars, students and art enthusiasts, and works are available for institutional loans. For more information, please visit wammke.org or call 414-252-0677.

Admission to WAM is always free. Masks are required.