Ruth Abrams

Ruth Ida Abrams is widely recognized for her unparalleled legal career, specifically as the first woman to serve on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, a tenure spanning from 1978 to 2000. Her appointment as the first female appellate justice in Massachusetts established a critical milestone in American legal history.

Yet, decades prior to her groundbreaking judicial service, Abrams engaged in a distinct and equally significant artistic phase documented within the Index of American Design (IAD). Active around 1937, she contributed to this vast federal initiative, which aimed to create a detailed visual record of American decorative and folk art produced before the twentieth century. This effort preserved thousands of designs and objects that might otherwise have been lost, creating an invaluable archive of museum-quality studies.

Abrams specialized in documenting theatrical ephemera, focusing almost exclusively on puppets and marionettes used in domestic and traveling entertainment. Her meticulous renderings, now held in the National Gallery of Art, transform these working stage figures into permanent cultural documents, illustrating both the craftsmanship of their construction and the often-whimsical character designs of the Depression era.

Her works include precise watercolor studies of figures such as the highly characterized Punch Boxer with Blue Coat and the complex rigging of The Doctor Marionette. Abrams detailed the biblical subject, the David and Goliath Marionette, alongside studies of Jack, the Nimble Juggler, demonstrating her commitment to capturing the functional complexity and unique personality of each piece. This focus on performance objects offers a specialized window into the vernacular theater traditions largely neglected by other IAD contributors.

The resulting high-quality prints from this documentation are now frequently accessible through the public domain, ensuring that the visual history of these early American performance arts remains widely available. This body of work secures Abrams’s place not only in legal history but also as a diligent preserver of ephemeral cultural assets. It is a quiet testament that an individual dedicated to the highest standards of modern justice found an earlier calling in providing downloadable artwork documenting America’s most charmingly defunct folklore.