At first glance, the image looks like a photograph. You see a rectangle of embroidery depicting several animals—a dog, a deer, a butterfly, a bird—in a dreamscape of flowering trees. The details feel almost tactile: the rough weave of the fabric, the individual satin stitches shading the animals’ fur, the shine of the thread. The top of the fabric appears to have been stitched haphazardly to its paper backing.
But this is not a photo—or at least not a photo of a textile. Those stitches would have no texture if rubbed with a thumb. That yellowed paper isn’t backing. What you're looking at is a 1936 watercolor by the artist Elizabeth Moutal, one of 18,000 works in the Index of American Design (IAD).
The IAD, a federally-funded project that ran from 1936 to 1942, employed more than a thousand artists to depict pre-20th century craft and design objects, with the goal of defining a uniquely American design aesthetic. Included are dolls and dining tables, glasses and weather vanes, clocks and chairs and coffee mills.
The objects depicted range in size from a household nail to a two-story California mission building. Some, like a rolling pin, are still used in the same essential form today. Others, like a loaf sugar cutter, point to use cases that no longer exist.
When Kara Braciale stumbled across these works in the online collection of the National Gallery of Art (NGA), they astonished her. The professorial lecturer in studio arts at the George Washington University’s Corcoran School of the Arts and Design had been looking for pieces she could bring her drawing class to examine in person. (At the time, individuals and classes could request drawings and prints from the NGA’s colossal collection of works on paper and spend time with them in the museum’s study rooms. Requests are currently closed while the collection is relocated to new storage space, but will reopen as the move is completed.)
Braciale is a weaver as well as a painter, so textiles and textile-making are part of her artistic practice. When she stumbled on the index’s “trompe l'oeil, very realistic images of textiles,” like Moutal’s embroidery panel or the work of Moutal’s teacher, Suzanne Chapman, she was instantly fascinated.
Like many, Braciale had never heard of the Index of American Design. But learning about it and examining the works sparked her artistic and pedagogical imagination. Not only did she take her drawing students to examine the pieces in person—showing them how a previous generation of artists had learned to observe three-dimensional objects and render them on paper—but she also started giving a capstone assignment in her drawing classes, “The Speculative Index,” that would open new directions in her teaching.
“The assignment is basically to propose a new object for the Index of American Design and to contextualize its entry,” Braciale said. Students might choose an object for its personal significance, cultural import, aesthetic interest or even as “a provocation or agit-prop about what ‘design’ or ‘American’ means now.”
After all, the IAD reflects a set of cultural values as well as aesthetic ones. The objects included—and those left out—reveal the project's priorities and its blind spots, giving insight into the particular institutional perspective it represented. What might students be drawn to include in 2026? How would they argue for an object's significance? And what would that object's inclusion say about the hypothetical IAD that contained it? The Speculative Index assignment, Braciale said, is “essentially about grounding a work of art in a historical conversation.”
Last year, Braciale partnered with Matthew Westerby, digital research officer at the NGA's Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, to develop a class, “Reimagining America by Design” held onsite at the museum.
Students in the class worked with NGA curators, archivists, librarians and exhibition designers and heard from visiting scholars. “We had access to all these resources at the National Gallery, and the people there were so generous with their time and so excited to work with students,” Braciale said. “Their enthusiasm was amazing.”
In fact, the NGA invested so fully in the students’ experience that the class’s final project—pitching an exhibition related to the index—has now come to life at the museum’s library. A two-part exhibit, “In the Library: Reimagining America by Design,” conceived and created by Braciale and Westerby’s students as a modified synthesis of their final projects, is on display there through Dec. 30.
Student curators at work
One of those students was Gabi Maldonado, now a sophomore. She took Braciale’s drawing class her first semester at GW, choosing for her Speculative Index entry a heavy-duty manual pencil sharpener belonging to her grandfather.
Compared to a photograph, a drawing or painting “humanizes the object in a way,” Maldonado said. The index’s pieces, like her own drawing of her grandfather’s pencil sharpener, have a subjective quality: “Someone is observing every single detail of this object, then translating that [to paper].”
Maldonado enrolled in the “Reimagining America by Design” class this spring, and knew the experience would be special the first time she entered the NGA’s vertical files to look at publications related to the index.
“It’s this room full of pull-out drawers, essentially file cabinets, full of ephemera and smaller items,” Maldonado explained, like photos of index artists at work, gallery pamphlets, catalogs and brochures.
These surrounding materials were built into the first part of the exhibition, “Research and Process,” which explores the class itself, including student assignments and discoveries made in the index. The second part, “Work and Play,” opening Nov. 2, will contrast student works with materials from NGA collections related to toys, games, dolls and figurines.
In designing “Research and Process,” Maldonado said, she and her classmates had to tell the joint stories of both the index and their class, balancing prints of IAD drawings with student work, class stories and ephemera from the vertical files. “The evolution from past to present was kind of the driving idea,” she said.
The exhibition includes images of IAD artists at work alongside the drawings they produced: left, a photo of artist Nicholas Acampora drawing a horse-shaped weathervane is juxtaposed with a photo of the resulting piece. Other displays tell stories from the class, like that of student Jose P. Lectora, who tracked down the history—and even, pictured, a physical replica—of a silver communion plate made for a Georgetown church. (Courtesy Kara Braciale)
The students had help from the NGA team as they contended with the physical realities of exhibition design. “I will say, during the installation, the final [case] definitely shifted from the digital layout slightly,” Maldonado said.
Some drawings were too delicate to display under the library’s light conditions and had to be rephotographed and presented as prints. Photos had to be spaced to keep the display from looking crowded or overwhelming. Ephemera with text might not be legible through glass unless elevated by a prop underneath—a prop that had to be designed, sized and installed. And, of course, each piece had to be accompanied by a text placard dating and contextualizing it.
“We had to make sure it made sense to the viewer,” Maldonado said. The final result made her proud: “Having the front framing the class and then breaking out into these different objects was really nice to look at.”
During the museum’s monthly National Gallery Night event in September, Maldonado was invited to speak to groups of attendees and guide them around the exhibition. There, too, she saw the index’s capacity to capture the imagination of anyone encountering it.
Maldonado makes her presentation to visitors at National Gallery Night in September. (Courtesy Kara Braciale)
“During my talk, I ended with the question ‘If you were to display any object, what would you choose and why?’ And a couple people came up after and gave their answers,” Maldonado remembered. One guest suggested a toaster. Another offered to donate antiques to be depicted in case the index ever started again.
It's a suggestion that intrigues Maldonado. The IAD's very existence suggests that the federal government of the time saw value in art and in artists. Documenting American design served American interests: the IAD might represent evidence of innovation, cement a useful national self-image or help the country compete for cultural influence with perceived aesthetic gatekeepers in Europe.
The project also reflects a government invested in employing artists, many of whom launched careers from their time working on the IAD. Some were talented women, immigrants and artists of color whose opportunities could otherwise have been restricted by segregated education and discriminatory law. Maldonado researched one Black artist, Edward L. Loper, who said that had he not been employed by the IAD he “would never have become an artist.”
In 2026, envisioning a national government that would restart something like the IAD may be a challenge. But on an individual level, anyone can start seeing their surroundings through its lens. You might notice the wood grain of your desktop or the texture of your socks, the shape of your phone or a glass in your sink. You could even follow in Braciale’s class’s footsteps to sketch your favorite water bottle or the space-age curves of your headphones.
“I feel like the great thing about the index is that it truly could start up again at any time,” Maldonado said, smiling.