Dress

Art Historical Context

This watercolor rendering of a dress, created around 1936 by Margaret Concha, belongs to the Index of American Design, a landmark Depression-era initiative of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project. The Index commissioned artists nationwide to produce thousands of precise illustrations documenting American decorative arts, folk crafts, and historical objects, preserving a visual record of the nation’s material culture at a time of economic hardship. Concha used watercolor, graphite, and gouache on paperboard—the standard media of Index plates—to capture the garment’s form, fa...

About the Artist

Margaret Concha

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 ...