Textiles Uncovered: The Milwaukee Handicraft Project

Sue Slick, Collection Information Specialist

If you are a regular reader of the ARTICULATE blog, you’ve been reading a bit about textiles and their storage lately.  

The thread continues, stitch by stitch. 

As Lauren Wolfer, Associate Curator of Special Collections & Archives, reported in her blog post about our new textile storage system, there were a few textile pieces rolled and stored in the back of our oldest textile rack that, for years, had remained out of sight and out of mind. This occurred for a variety of reasons, the biggest one being the awkward accessibility of the old racks and necessity of installing new ones. It was quite exciting unwrapping the few old pieces to study and photograph them anew. Jenna Gilley, Associate Curator of Exhibitions, did a deep dive into the gorgeous Mathieu Matégot (1910-2001) hand-loomed wool tapestry which we are fortunate to have – a wonderful piece of modern textile work and an exciting work to put on display. I’m looking forward to seeing what Jenna does with it in the galleries! 

Another piece that emerged from the depths of the old rack is a block-printed wall hanging on a large sheet of fabric: 

Lauren and I were a bit mystified when we unrolled it because its imagery is based on a European folk motif featuring cattle, roosters, and dancers in folk dress.  Could it portray a wedding or harvest festival, we wondered? 

Then we found a clue on the verso! A small tag stitched to the back says it is Tyrolean! We’re not sure why, but this work lacks complete documentation; we believe it was deaccessioned [removed from the museum’s permanent collection] some time ago, but regardless stayed in our textile storage. We do not know if it was given to us in the 1930s, when it was made, or acquired later. Either way, finding it has introduced us to a remarkable story from the Great Depression. 

Another small tag stitched to a corner, shown above, was the key to its provenance as it identifies the piece as a product of the Milwaukee W.P.A. Handicraft Project. Wondering how obscure this history would be to dig into, I was pleasantly surprised to find a wealth of information online. The Milwaukee Handicraft Project (MHP) was born of the deprivations of the 1930s following the 1929 stock market crash. The hard work and energy of a determined group of people, who refused to give in to the hardships of the times, saw this life-changing program succeed far beyond their modest, initial goals. Milwaukee, like many American cities of that era, suffered a wage-earner decline of over 40%. In 1935, President Roosevelt’s Emergency Appropriation Act set aside five billion dollars for work relief programs including the Work Projects Administration (WPA). The Milwaukee Handicraft Project was one of these programs, employing Milwaukee’s unskilled women and minorities from 1935 to 1942 and supplying beautiful, high-quality, and useful goods to those in need–making their lives brighter in those dark days. 

The program was conceived by Harriet Pettibone Clinton, Director of the Women’s Division of the WPA in Milwaukee. Clinton was determined to improve the lives of destitute, unskilled women who made up only 12-18% of the WPA workers nationally. Strict WPA program rules prevented multiple family members from receiving these jobs, and the higher-paying jobs were mainly given to male bread-winners, leaving women across the country deprived of work. Clinton’s dream was to train these women in the making of handicrafts that could be useful to institutions that served those in need, and that the training might be sustaining to those who received it. Her modest first projects would involve making scrapbooks of wallpaper cuttings. She hoped to secure work for 250 women; but, by week three, over 900 women had responded. She had no idea what else would evolve from her humble goals. 

When Clinton approached her friend, Elsa Ulbricht (1885-1980), art educator at the Milwaukee Teacher’s College, about helping her develop the program, Ulbricht promised that the women would be making meaningful contributions and the federal money used for significant and transformational work. Ulbricht took it upon herself to develop a program that would contribute to “the cultural development of both the makers and the community”.   

In her proposal to the WPA she stated that the workers would be trained “to make by hand household articles of wood, paper, yarn and cloth. The objects made will be distributed to relief families, nursery schools serving relief families, and publicly owned institutions.” Relief programs were prohibited from competing with private industry or with government work, requiring sponsors that provided some financial support aside from the federal government funding. Frank Baker, president of Ulbricht’s college, agreed to sponsor her program and permitted her to carry it out while teaching full-time. Ulbricht planned to use as much cheap, discarded, or repurposed material as she could find when goods and materials were scarce and costly. She employed some of the graduates of her art education program to work as foremen, supervisors, and art directors in the program – a boon for these new, young teachers unable to secure jobs and so much like the young graduates who tried to enter the workforce during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

In the seven years the MHP project existed as a WPA program it employed and trained over 5,000 workers and produced thousands of high-quality, useful objects: braided rugs, furniture, toys, woven wall hangings, drapes, screen-printed textiles, books, training kits, songbooks, and scrapbooks of clipped articles for hospitals and other institutions. Basic products lead to more complex ones like the 39-volume braille dictionary that the book-binding unit produced for the Wisconsin School for the Blind and the elaborate theatre costumes that followed the sewing of choral robes for the Milwaukee State Teachers College. Some of the repurposed material included, for example, jute from surplus military burlap bags unraveled and rewoven as household textiles. Discarded scrap fabric from the WPA sewing project was used to make braided rugs. Many products were given to institutions in need like children’s hospitals and orphanages, where the environments were made more cheerful and comfortable with bright curtains, quilts, toys, and wall hangings. Artists and craftsmen were employed in product development; for example, carpenters cut the wooden toys out for the workers to paint and a sculptor made the prototype of the face that was molded of soft materials for the popular line of cloth dolls. Many of the goods feature happy images of modern design while others, like our wall hanging, feature traditional cultural imagery from other lands. 

When the WPA offered to set up a segregated site for African American workers, the MHP adamantly refused. Workers of all races, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds worked side-by-side contributing to the array of lovely designs of household goods and toys. A line of folk costumes for manikins was made for the Milwaukee Public Museum and a little soft doll with dark “skin” became the very popular “Honey Chile”, named by the African American sewers, and one of the first American mass-produced Black dolls. 

Another unique characteristic of the MHP was the savvy marketing developed to promote and educate the public about the program. Model showrooms were set up to demonstrate the reasonably priced décor, demos were regularly conducted in major department stores, and booths were extremely popular venues at the Wisconsin State Fair and at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Dozens of photographs were made of all aspects of the project and they, alongside other artifacts and ephemera, were given by Ulbricht to the Milwaukee Public Museum, providing a remarkable resource on the history of this program. 

And our wall hanging? It was one of the many products offered in the 1939 MHP catalogue. P518a could be had for $3.00. I wonder if it was given to the Fort Wayne Art School and Museum as part of the MHP marketing efforts; though, as stated earlier, no documentation has been found – yet. 

The next page in the catalogue lists the wall hanging titled “Rubaiyat” inspired by the Omar Khayyam poem and designed by Barbara Warren. It was a favorite of Eleanor Roosevelt, seen below with the Roosevelt Scottie dog, Fala. It was presented to Mrs. Roosevelt in November 1936 by the MHP workers when Mrs. Roosevelt visited Milwaukee as First Lady. She even wrote about the program in her column, “My Day”. 

The MHP continued operating into 1942, but by then the U.S. had entered WWII and the nation’s focus had shifted to wartime efforts and other measures to “keep the homefires burning”. 

Although this “print” is not one of our most valuable collection objects its story is a fascinating slice of American history, telling another tale of American fortitude and the power of art and handicraft to transform lives. 

References 

Elsa Ulbricht: A Career in Art by Peter C. Merrill, Milwaukee County Historical Society, https://www.tfaoi.org/aa/3aa/3aa88.htm  

Milwaukee WPA Handicraft Project Online Exhibit, University of Wisconsin Milwaukee University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Digital Commons, https://dc.uwm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1018&context=eti_pubs  

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Wisconsin Arts Projects of The WPA, 1935-1943 https://uwm.edu/lib-collections/wpa/ 

WPA Milwaukee Handicraft Project, Milwaukee Public Museum, https://www.mpm.edu/index.php/research-collections/history/online-collections-research/wpa-milwaukee-handicraft-project