Bedspread

Art Historical Context

This watercolor and graphite rendering by Margaret Concha, created around 1938, meticulously documents a historic American bedspread. The original textile measured an impressive 108 inches wide by 84 inches long, and Concha’s sheet—nearly 20 by 20—captures its scale and character with precision. As a work from the Index of American Design, it belongs to a Depression-era federal project that employed artists to record the nation’s folk and decorative arts before they disappeared. The Index of American Design, part of the Works Progress Administration, produced thousands of such renderings between 1935 and 1942. Artists like Concha used watercolor and graphite to achieve both documentary accuracy and visual appeal, treating everyday objects—quilts, furniture, ceramics—as worthy of careful study. Bedspreads in particular often embodied regional weaving, quilting, or embroidery traditions passed through families, making them vivid records of American domestic life and craftsmanship. Today the drawing invites viewers to appreciate not only the original maker’s skill but also the artist’s role in preserving it. These renderings allowed museums and scholars to study objects that might otherwise have been lost, celebrating the ingenuity of ordinary Americans through an elegant, accessible medium.

About the Artist

Margaret Concha · 1897–1994

Margaret Concha is an artist whose life and career remain incompletely documented in the major scholarly literature on art history. No confirmed birth or death dates have been established, and details of her training, nationality, and primary working period are not reliably recorded in available sources. The works attributed to her suggest engagement with the visual traditions of her era, though ...