The Facts
On August 26, 2025, the National Gallery of Art announced an exhibition titled "Women and the Index of American Design," the first to focus on women's contributions to the federal art project. The show features roughly 60 watercolors by some 50 women artists, including Hal Blakeley, Rose Campbell-Gerke, Lucille Chabot, Suzanne Chapman, Dorothy Hay Jensen, Elizabeth Moutal, Selma Sandler, and Carmel Wilson. The watercolors depict household objects such as embroideries, quilt designs, toys, and weather vanes, rendered as part of the Index of American Design, which between 1935 and 1942 commissioned over 18,000 watercolors from about 1,000 artists under the Works Progress Administration. The National Gallery has stewarded the Index collection since 1943, and the exhibition will also include archival material, photographs, and technical studies.
The Signal
The exhibition signals a broader institutional effort to recover the overlooked roles of women in major state-sponsored art initiatives, particularly within the New Deal era. For collectors and curators, it underscores the documentary and aesthetic value of these watercolors, which have long been underappreciated as a resource for American design history. By foregrounding the female artists who shaped the Index, the National Gallery is also responding to ongoing demands for more inclusive narratives in museum programming, potentially influencing how similar government-funded collections are reassessed in the future.
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- Artists: Hal Blakeley, Rose Campbell-Gerke, Lucille Chabot, Suzanne Chapman, Dorothy Hay Jensen, Elizabeth Moutal, Selma Sandler, Carmel Wilson, Ruth Reeves
- People: Romana Javitz, Holger Cahill
- Museums: National Gallery of Art
- Locations: Washington, DC
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