These Beacon Blanket cutouts show how E. I. Couse entered the world of mass marketing, specifically for Beacon Blanket’s advertising campaign for its factory-made “Indian” blankets. 

Various cutouts with different images graced department store windows during a 14-year campaign that spanned the USA and other countries, as far away as South Africa. Many of the cutouts included slots for a sample blanket to be incorporated into the display (accounting for the apparent white stripe seen on one of these images). 

Modeled by Taos Pueblo member Ben Lujan and his son Eliseo, these figures sold an aspiration of the handmade and pre-industrial, even as the blankets themselves were manufactured by one of the country’s largest textile mills.