A seagull is eating fish for lunch, disrupting the regularity of the water’s waves as it splashes around. This is a scene so common on the Milwaukee shores of Lake Michigan that it served as design inspiration for local craftsmen, and in this case, print designs on portfolio covers. This portfolio dates back to the 1930s and once housed twenty-four mats of printed textiles, each displaying a different animal to serve as a design sampler. This portfolio was a product of the Milwaukee Handicraft Project, a program started by the Works Project Administration where women handcrafted goods as a way to support their families during the Great Depression, and represents the hands that crafted these products.
As the mission of the Milwaukee Handicraft Project was to hire unskilled women in need of financial support, they sought to teach women how to make use of readily available, otherwise overlooked or discarded materials. The program produced utilitarian items from wood, paper and cloth to be sold to public institutions such as schools. Many divisions worked under the Milwaukee Handicraft Project, crafting different items such as dolls, quilts, and games. Among these divisions was a book-binding division, where women illustrated pages to be used for children’s books and manuals. One particular project saw the creation of songbook illustrations, and it was out of this project that the designer in charge of the division sought to evolve the book-binding unit from illustrating images by hand to block printing them.
Block printing was a laborious process with many involved steps. To create the printing block, the designs were first traced onto linoleum. Once the design was transferred, the women could begin to carefully carve out the negative space, leaving the original design ready to be printed onto the textiles. The stamp-like printing block was coated in a thick layer of pigment and firmly pressed onto the textile substrate, resulting in a newly patterned piece of cloth. Inspired by Wisconsin’s natural environment, including the seagulls that inhabit the shores of Lake Michigan, these designs were purposefully highly detailed, which ensured more time and effort were involved in the creation of the printing blocks. This, in turn, meant a more complex task, which resulted in more wages to be paid. In this portfolio, the wavy lines and dots used to depict the Great Lake add a new degree of intricacy. Despite there being larger printing blocks, the women working in the book-binding unit would perform a much more labor-intensive practice.
The increased workload led to an increase in wages, but block printing was also a successful addition due to its popularity among buyers. The program could incorporate the block-printed textiles in a variety of products including covering books, and buyers could use them to decorate their living rooms. Even the Milwaukee Handicraft Project’s founder hung a printed textile in her home, a symbol of the success that the program was seeing.
In this case, however, the printed textile was used to cover a portfolio. The portfolios ranged in size, the smallest being nine inches by twelve inches, and the largest being nineteen inches by twenty-four inches. These portfolios housed approximately twenty designs in each, and were constructed similarly to a book. Instead of pages sewn into it, matted print samples were stacked on top of each other. The item was filled with print samples with different animal designs to be used for children’s books, but different portfolios could have different themes.
At fourteen inches by eleven inches, this portfolio was mid-sized compared to the other types of portfolios produced. Prices ranged from $1.75 and $2.75, in relation to size and number of prints; priced at $1.75 this is one of the less expensive objects produced. It is unknown who these portfolios were made for and who they intended to sell them to, but it is clear that it was another product that allowed for utilizing inexpensive materials and creating more work for the women.
Creating handcrafted portfolios, such as this, was a significant turning point within the Milwaukee Handicraft Project. Without completely abandoning their original initiative, producing affordable, educational tools for young children’s classrooms, they created a method to sustain their employees. Not only was their transition to block-printing materials a method to increase wages, but the beautiful printed textiles could be used in a variety of ways that proved to be popular with public markets. This portfolio illustrates a rich part of Milwaukee history, not only in the way that it captures the image of a seagull fishing in Lake Michigan, but also in the way that it tells the story of local ingenuity and the success of the Milwaukee Handicraft Project.
Written by Ava Schueller, April 2025.
Sources
Leslie Bellais, “No Idle Hands: A Milwaukee WPA Handicraft Project,” The Wisconsin Magazine of History, Vol. 84, No. 2, Winter 2000-2001, pp. 48-56. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4636902
Lois M. Quinn and Mary Kellogg Rice, “Milwaukee WPA Handicraft Project Online Exhibit.” University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee Digital Commons. 2012. Accessed December 2024. http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1793/90163
Jacqueline M. Schweitzer “Women’s Work: The WPA Milwaukee Handicraft Project.” Milwaukee Public Museum. Accessed October 2024. https://www.mpm.edu/research-collections/history/online-collections-research/wpa-milwaukee-handicraft-project
Elsa Ulbricht, “The Story of the Milwaukee Handicraft Project.” Design. February 1944, 6-7.
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries, “Wisconsin Arts Projects of the WPA, 1935-1943,” Digital Collection. Accessed April 2025. https://uwm.edu/lib-collections/wpa/
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