Santo

Art Historical Context

This 1936 rendering by Maude Valle, created in watercolor, colored pencil, and on paperboard, belongs to the Index of American Design, a landmark New Deal-era project that documented the nation’s folk and decorative arts. Valle’s precise illustration records a santo—a painted wooden saint figure typical of Hispanic religious tradition—faithfully capturing the original object’s modest scale of roughly 13½ by 17¾ inches. Produced under the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project, the Index employed hundreds of artists to create an archival visual record of American material culture ...