A collection of approximately 22,000 renderings of objects of folk and popular
manufacture made before 1890, housed at the National Gallery of Art in Washington,
DC. Many works of folk art and craft can be viewed there in the form of highly realistic
watercolor renderings. The Index of American Design was one of the many innovative
projects sponsored by President Franklin D.Roosevelt’s New Deal, and when proposed in
1935 it was suggested that, in addition to employing hundreds of out-of-work draftsmen,
the Index would preserve a record of past American achievement, inspire new design,
and serve as a reference work for scholars. However, the project proved to be most
successful mainly as an unemployment relief effort.
Because Index administrators fell far short of their anticipated goal of 100,000 images,
they never made any serious moves toward assembling the numerous illustrations into the
authoritative encyclopedia on early American material culture that they had promised.
Furthermore, initial claims of high scholarly standards and a keen focus on interpretation
were . relinquished when Constance Rourke, then one of the country’s foremost cultural
historians, was dismissed from the project’s administrative staff in 1936. The Index was
then transformed essentially into an exercise in fine-art skill and collector taste. Index
plates were selected principally on the basis of their appearance, and little attention was
paid to the social or historical relevance of the object depicted. Consequently, coverage
of many genres, media, technologies, regions, social and ethnic groups, and periods is, at
best, spotty. While the images in the Index of American Design are often beautiful to
look at, they reveal more about New Deal artists than they do about the history of
American folk art and craft.
John Michael Vlach
References
Cahill, Holger. 1950. Introduction. In The Index of American Design, by Erwin O.Christensen. New
York: Macmillan, pp. ix-xvii.
Vlach, John Michael. 1985. Holger Cahill as Folklorist. Journal of American Folklore 98:148–162.
——. 1988. The Index of American Design: From Reference Tool to Shopper’s Guide. In Wood
and Woodcarvings from the Index of American Design, ed. Helen A.Harrison. East Hampton,
NY: Guild Hall Museum, pp. 7–14.