Join Warehouse Art Museum in welcoming Jackie Schweitzer for a talk about the Works Progress Administration and the Milwaukee Handcraft Project in the late 1930s.

During the height of the Great Depression an innovative Works Progress Administration project in Milwaukee gained national attention for its original designs. Between 1935 and 1942 the Milwaukee Handicraft Project hired thousands of workers to produce textiles, furniture, toys and books. This lecture will feature period images of the workers and products from this project and provide context of WPA projects in Milwaukee at that time.

WAM’s exhibition is the first comprehensive retrospective of Ruth Grotenrath’s 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.

The exhibition is open until March 31.

Admission to WAM is always free. Masks are required.