Florence Milto

Florence Milto was an American artist and documentarian active primarily between 1935 and 1941. Milto’s documented body of work is directly tied to the Index of American Designs (IoAD), a major visual archiving initiative established under the Federal Art Project during the Depression era. This program focused on systematically documenting American decorative arts, crafts, and folk objects dating before 1900.

Milto contributed detailed graphic documentation of traditional American domestic artifacts. Five of these historical records are represented in museum collections. The subjects documented include three separate designs of a historical Coverlet, a traditional Doll, and a household Bellows.

As documentation created through a federal effort, many of Milto’s detailed renderings for the Index of American Designs are available in the public domain, serving as a critical resource for scholars of American material culture. Today, researchers often seek Florence Milto prints for their clarity and precision. These historical design records are preserved in prominent institutions, notably held within the collections of the National Gallery of Art, offering museum-quality records of vanishing folk arts.