free art, old frames.
repurposing a custom frame for very nearly free art.
When James and I got married in 2012, my parents framed a large letterpress print for us as a wedding present. At just over two by three feet, it loomed large on the wall of our exceedingly small studio. I loved the print at the time and for a long while after that, but changes in mood and moment meant that the print spent most of its tenure at our last apartment stored in a closet. James and I planned to reuse the frame—which had been custom-built by a local framer, and had cost my parents a small fortune—for something new, but our casual search for something affordable in the right size kept coming up empty.
So, it was with considerable interest that I read Juliana Ramirez of Search Terms announce she had “the cheapest way to get the biggest, boldest piece of artwork in your home.” Her piece is worth a read in its entirety, especially for anyone interested in printing large works on canvas, but it was especially inspiring to me as a reminder of the absolute trove of national treasures—more than 60,000 of them—available for free download from The National Gallery of Art.
Among the Gallery’s collection of free art is the Index of American Design, which hits my particular sweet spot of material culture meeting New Deal-era government support for working artists. The Index was a Federal Art Project initiative and part of the larger Works Progress Administration, developed to put artists to work during the Great Depression. To create the index, a thousand watercolorists painted more than 18,000 design objects, from museum and personal collections, in an effort “to identify and preserve a national, ancestral aesthetic for the United States.” As you might imagine, the collection is an imperfect representation with a narrow definition of ancestral and American that largely excluded Indigenous, African American, and Asian American objects. Still, what the Index did manage to catalog is kind of incredible and there’s something about the stark but detailed close-up of everyday objects that I love, to absolutely no one’s surprise. They have a certain Magritte quality, don’t they? Ceci n’est pas une pipe, et cetera? Anyway! Like all of the National Gallery of Art Open Access images, the Index files are available to download at high resolution, which means it’s possible to print them out nice and big, which is exactly what we needed to fill our own neglected frame.
For paid subscribers, all of the details on what we did, what art we considered, and where to find similar frames, below!