Shirt

Art Historical Context

This watercolor and graphite work, titled Shirt, was created by Virginia Berge around 1937 as part of the Index of American Design. The Index was a New Deal-era initiative of the Federal Art Project that employed artists to document America's decorative arts, folk crafts, and material culture through highly detailed illustrations. Berge's rendering captures an everyday garment with the precision typical of the project, using watercolor to convey texture and color while graphite provided fine linear details. These Index plates served as a visual archive of objects ranging from colonial furnitu...