Infant's Booties

Art Historical Context

Sara Garfinkel’s *Infant’s Booties* is a delicate pen-and-ink rendering created between 1935 and 1942 as part of the Index of American Design, a New Deal initiative under the Works Progress Administration. The project employed hundreds of artists to document everyday American decorative arts—textiles, furniture, and household objects—from the colonial era through the early twentieth century. By recording these items with precision, the Index preserved visual evidence of ordinary domestic life at a time when many handmade objects were disappearing. Executed in pen and ink on paper, the drawing...