Milwaukee Handicraft Monday
“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” ~Albert Einstein
Today, February 26th, is National Tell a Fairy Tale Day. To celebrate, we tracked down the only fairy tale character costumes we could find within the Milwaukee Handicraft collection. While these costume designs are titled “Fairy Tale Character,” the characters for these costumes aren’t specifically identified; does anyone out there have a guess?
The designs were done in watercolor, pencil and ink by artist Jane Rost and can be found in the digital collection “Wisconsin Arts Projects of the WPA.” These were digitized from the originals in volume 10 of the “Costume Design” portfolio.
View our other Milwaukee Handicraft Monday posts.
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.
The Wisconsin Arts Projects of the WPA digital collection was made possible with generous financial support provided by The Chipstone Foundation.
-Katie, Special Collections Graduate Intern
