About Esther Lewittes Mipaas

Artist. Activist. Mother. Scholar.

Esther Lewittes Mipaas was a key figure among a generation of creative women whose careers blurred the boundaries between commercial and artistic practices. Born Esther Lewittes in 1911, Mipaas grew up in the Bronx, completed her Master of Arts in art history at New York University, and went to work in the midst of the Great Depression as a renderer, “researcher” and “‘supervising artist’”* for the American Index of Design.

In 1935, Esther married the British-born Federal Arts Project photographer Cyril Mipaas. Upon the official entry of the United States into the Second World War, the couple moved to Los Angeles where Esther pursued work as a draftswoman for Lockheed and soon caught the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for her attendance at meetings of Communist Party members.

Cyril worked as a cinematographer, but jobs became hard to find and eventually he lost his vision in one eye. Esther took up freelance documentary and portrait photography and became the family’s main breadwinner. Among her clients was the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles, who had recently undertaken the formidable task of housing the growing population of defense workers. The Housing Authority exhibited Mipaas’s photographs at housing meetings across the country to great acclaim.

Mipaas continued her photographic practice into the 1990s. Her interest as a scholar and artist in everything from the iron bridges of Central Park to Israel in 1972 is captured in her hundreds of photographs and negatives, many of which remained unpublished during her lifetime.

In 2014, Esther Lewittes Mipaas’s photographs caught the attention of doctoral student Nicole Krup Oest when she was studying the collection of the Los Angeles City Housing Authority at the Southern California Library. Oest contacted Mipaas’s daughter, Judith Hibbard-Mipaas, who opened Esther’s archive to research and aided in applying for access to Esther’s F.B.I. file. Three years later, the National Archives and Records Administration released over 400 pages on Esther Lewittes Mipaas, revealing a life scrutinized by federal agents but until now unacknowledged by historians of art and design.

The largest collections of Mipaas's work are at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library in New York City.

Mipaas’s photographs are also held in the Photo Collection of the Los Angeles Public Library and in the Housing Authority’s collection of photographs at the Southern California Library.

*A special thank you to Janneken Smucker for bringing the various facets of Esther Lewittes’s role on the Index to light. Smucker located several Index of American Design “Data Report Sheet[s]” crediting Esther Lewittes with “[r]esearch work” for renderings of quilts at the Brooklyn Museum. These renderings that Lewittes conducted research for at now at the National Gallery of Art. (Janneken Smucker, emails to Nicole Krup Oest, January 7 and 30, 2022). Smucker also found more recent studies referring to Lewittes as a “supervising artist.” (Smucker, email to Oest, January 17, 2022, citing Barbara Schaffer, A Passion for Quilts: The Story of Florence Peto, 1881-1970 [Livingston, NJ: Heritage Quilt Project of New Jersey, Inc., 2011], 30).