UW Gender & Women's Studies Librarian

Milwaukee Handicraft Monday: Caption This!

The title for this photograph is simply “Woman dying fabric, Milwaukee Handicraft Project” in the  Wisconsin Arts Projects of the WPA digital collection. We think our viewers might have some better ideas on how to title or caption this photograph. Tell us your ideas by commenting below! 

(No Contest this time around, I think we could all use a “win” this spring)

The photograph was digitized from the original lantern slide, which is part of the Elsa Emile Ulbricht Papers, 1905-1978 held by the @uwmarchives. And, make sure you take a look at our other Milwaukee Handicraft Project posts!

-Katie, Special Collections Graduate Intern

The MHP was founded in 1935 by Harriet Clinton, head of the Women’s Division of Wisconsin’s WPA to help unskilled women laborers provide income for their families. Clinton hired Elsa Ulbricht, an art professor at the Milwaukee State Teacher’s College (one of UWM’s predecessor institutions), to direct the project. The MHP hired around 5,000 people in total throughout its highly successful seven-year existence. Read More about the Project.

From our gallery label:

These objects were once part of the folk art collection of Elie Nadelman (1882-1946), the avant-garde sculptor. From 1924 to 1934, Nadelman’s collection was displayed in his Museum of Folk Arts, located in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. The Historical Society purchased Nadelman’s entire collection in 1937.

Portraying mostly women and children as they perform domestic tasks (sewing, cooking, harvesting, or teaching/learning) and leisure activities (reading, writing letters, painting, or playing music), these richly decorated, hand-painted paper dolls present a broad view of mid-nineteenth-century daily life.

The mass commercial appeal of paper dolls arose around 1850 when these dolls began to appear in popular periodicals; however, homemade, hand-painted dolls had been circulating long beforehand. These dolls belong to a larger set of 85 figures, which were crafted around 1855 for a young girl in the Canadian town of Drummondville outside Quebec City, as indicated by an inscription on the reverse of one doll in the set and by a November 1924 article in Harper’s Magazine featuring a descendent of the original owner, Ms. Lenox E. Chase. While it is unclear who painted these dolls, and while they may have been produced over an extended period of time given variations in the stock and coloration of the paper, all of the dolls seem to have been crafted by the same artist and each one includes its own unique name, written on the verso by the same hand each time. Genealogical records suggest that the dolls originally belonged to the Sutherland family, a Canadian family of British descent who had arrived in the English-Canadian town of Drummondville by the 1840’s, and the dolls eventually would have been passed down to Ms. Chase, from whom Elie Nadelman likely acquired the set for his Museum of Folk and Peasant Arts.

All objects: Paper doll, ca.1855, Unidentified maker. Watercolor and graphite on paper laid on card, cut out around contour of figure, Purchased from Elie Nadelman, 1937. 

Bower, Maurice L., 1889-1980. Your public library is free – use it! Washington, D.C. : Department of the Interior, Bureau of Education, 1919

Our team has been thinking a lot about all of you in all of this.   Here are some updates about our services, and some extra understanding, support, helps and advice from some of our staff to help get you, and all of us, through this. <3

One of the most important things in here is about our direct services, so we want to put it up here all by itself:

It’s okay right now for anyone to use our direct services – that’s primarily our message boards, our text/SMS line at (206) 866-2279, and our live chat, all of which are virtual – even if you are not asking about sex, sexuality, sexual health or relationships. In other words, if you just want or need to talk with another human, for any reason, you are welcome to talk to us and to use our services to do that. You can find all three of those services on the menu on the top right corner of our desktop site, or in the dropdown on our mobile front page.

Gif below is from this article.

This spring was supposed to be an exciting time for Xander Christou. He’s a senior in high school in Austin, Texas, and was looking forward to all the fun: prom, senior skip day and of course, graduation.

But all that’s now out the window. “There’s a sense that it’s incomplete,” says Christou. The school district has closed until April 3rd and Christou says he has this feeling that a unique chapter in his life — senior year — is slipping away. “They’re just parts that we may never get to experience.” One big disruption: any attempt at making plans for next year. “We’re in the midst of college decisions,” he says, and the coronavirus has “really thrown a wrench into a number of things.”

Christou spent most of last fall like many high school seniors: researching and applying to schools. He planned to spend the spring visiting some of the campuses he was accepted to. “Online, the colleges are just names and logos and programs,” he says, “nothing will compare to actually being on campus and speaking face-to-face with current students.”