The Federal Art Project, a program of the Works Progress Administration that employed out-of-work artists, aimed to create a systematic catalog of folk and decorative arts that contemporary designers could use as inspiration. Rather than take black and white photographs of weathervanes, toys, furniture, metalwork, and quilts, the Index of American Design (IAD) tasked unemployed artists to paint life-like watercolor renderings of objects in a form of hyperrealism reminiscent of trompe l’oeil (“fool the eye”). The results of this project are a vast archive of over 18,000 paintings by nearly 1200 artists, now in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Conceived as a means to record a “quintessentially American style” and the “spirit of American design,” IAD administrators wanted American designers to draw upon American precedents rather than continue to turn exclusively to Europe for inspiration. They wanted the IAD to answer the question plaguing many cultural critics: “Have we an American design?” This impulse to document American design fit with a growing interest in American folk art, fueled by artists and collectors searching for the precursors to modernism in the carvings, metalwork, textiles, and paintings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Project planners imagined that portfolios reproducing the watercolor paintings would be available through public libraries and community art centers. Although widely circulating portfolios never came to fruition, artists painted almost 700 renderings that feature quilts or details of fabrics from quilts.