Ranka S. Woods

Ranka S. Woods was an artist documented as active during a concise period in the late 1930s, specifically between 1937 and 1938. Woods’s work is closely associated with documentation efforts related to the Index of American Design, a project dedicated to recording historical American decorative and folk arts.

Seven documented works attributed to Woods are preserved in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, establishing their contribution to preserving visual records of American material culture. The artist specialized in detailed renderings of historical objects, reflecting regional decorative traditions. Notable pieces held by the museum include three different studies of the religious screen Retablo, as well as detailed renderings of a Saddle and a Santo.

The inclusion of these works in a major institutional collection like the National Gallery of Art confirms Ranka S. Woods’s involvement in documenting cultural artifacts during the era of the federal art projects. Due to the historical nature of the records, images derived from Ranka S. Woods prints are often considered part of the public domain. These valuable cultural records are frequently reproduced as high-quality prints for scholarly research and reference purposes.