The Blockhouse of Boston

In the beginning, the Blockhouse had two small apartments, one for male members and another for females, where the artists could live dormitory-style at virtually no cost and work in the studio on the premises.

This traditional handicraft method, while slowing and limiting production, assured them control to carry their ideas undistorted into the final pieces.

In addition to acting as a center for artists, the Blockhouse also taught classes in silk screen and block printing, ceramics, sketching and painting in watercolor and oil.

From 1947 to 1955, when it closed its doors, the work of Blockhouse was featured in Life,[11] Vogue [12] The New Yorker,[13] The New York Times,[14] Harper's Bazaar,[15] The Christian Science Monitor, Women's Wear Daily,[16] the Boston Globe [17] and numerous other regional publications.

Designs from the Blockhouse collection were reproduced in commercial volumes by Wesley Simpson, Inc., Stoffel and Company, Strauss & Mueller, J.H.

[19] After Blockhouse disbanded members scattered about New England and other areas of the United States, producing art and teaching Blockhouse-style textile and artistic design through the country.

Blockhouse was founded and led by Paul Coombs and Janet Doub Erickson, both recent graduates of the Massachusetts College of Art.

Later in life she wrote on textile design and vernacular architecture and published another book of her line drawings of Boston during the Blockhouse period.

Janet Doub demonstrating block printing at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine in 1949. [ 5 ]
Fragment of "Salem," a large (approximately one by two meter) Blockhouse print on cotton by Janet Doub Erickson. This example shows how the artist repeated the image with slight variations to create the larger textile pattern she sought.