THE WPA AND QUILTING, MEMORIALIZED (Cheri)

I'm in a bit of mourning.

Mark and I got caught in the Crowdstrike impact on the airlines early this week, so had to cancel our planned trip to the Bay Area for the 2024 Pacific International Quilt Festival.

I decided to do a couple of posts from last year's show, the first being a group of quilts that were created from patterns drawn and distributed as part of a Works Progress Administration program in Pennsylvania.  Kentucky's Berea College, "the first integrated, co-educational college in the South," has memorialized the project:

One small WPA program called The Museum Extension Project (MEP) employed
curators, educators, and craftspeople in many states
to create visual aids for the study of history and cultures.
The colorful prints of quilt square patterns on display in this exhibition
were part of that initiative. They were published in 1937
by the Pennsylvania MEP office in Penndel (formerly South Langhorne) . . . .

In 2022, a group of Maryland quilters decided to create quilts using the block designs:

Here is the block design and the artist's statement for the quilt at the top:

Another one of the quilts, using a design that I believe pulled from the 19th century:

I like the artist's description of her influences.  "Grunge" is the name of a currently-popular fabric line.

The Barn-Raising layout of log cabin blocks, in modern colors:

And a block that we definitely don't see anymore:

You can see the WPA drawings for 15 other blocks here.

There was a wonderfully-interactive display of New Deal quilts at the International Quilt Museum in Lincoln, Nebraska, and you can still see pictures of the exhibited quilts or walk the entire gallery, using Google Map-style technology, here.

Janneken Smucker, a 30-something Professor of History at West Chester University, recently released the book A New Deal for Quilts on an overlapping subject, which I am totally looking forward to reading!

Here are various resources related to the book, including an extensive summary.

If you aren't buying that book, you can read a quick summary of the WPA program, also written by Dr. Smucker, on the Living New Deal website, which is devoted to the broader topic of various New Deal programs.  About halfway down the page there are a couple of links to very interesting discussions of graphic "modernist" quilts that women made during the Depression to express their political views.

There is a less commercial book written in 1990 about the Pennsylvania WPA program, and I found this charming blog post written in 2019 by someone who aimed to create each of the quilt blocks that the program had documented.  Her blog tapered off a few years ago; I wonder what happened?