Margaret O’Rorke describes sitting in her garden and showing a friend a vessel she had made, holding it up to the light, and being struck by the beauty of the translucence, and wanting to pursue this quality in porcelain. It’s a process of learning from each piece, because you don’t know how the light will come through it until the piece is finished. She hopes the feeling in her hands when she moves the clay will be felt by those who encounter her work, and share in the pleasure she receives from the clay.
Margaret O’Rorke. Photo by Alberto Ferrero.
O’Rorke began as a painter, and then became a potter. In 1992, she spent several months with Japanese potter Koie Ryoji and was influenced by his inventiveness, as her amazing clay lights demonstrate. Her manipulation of the porcelain clay reminds of Stratoz when he’s stretching dough for his grandmother’s strudel recipe, stretching it until light passes through. I love how O’Rorke has taken her revelation and had adventures with it, learning a whole process of making functional lighting, as well as invoking wonder with her translucent creations.
For Martin Luther King Day, it is apt to pay tribute to Margaret Walker(1915-1998), African-American poet. I first read her powerful poem, For My People, when I was an undergraduate. The poem first appeared in Poetry Magazine in 1937, and became her signature piece, the poem by which she was known. In 1968 she founded the Institute for the Study of History, Life, and Culture of Black People (now the Margaret Walker Alexander National Research Center). The Margaret Walker Personal Papers Digital Archives includes scanned images of her journals, with her own handwriting. Here are the last two stanzas of For My People:
For my people standing staring trying to fashion a better way,
trying to fashion a world that will hold all the people,
all the faces, all the adams and eves and their countless
generations;
Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a
bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second
generation full of courage issue forth; let a people
loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of
healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing
in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs be
written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now
rise and take control.
The full poem and an audio clip are available at the Internet Poetry Archive. Below is a video of Leah Ward Sears, Supreme Court Justice of Georgia, reading For My People, as part of the Favorite Poem Project.
The May Queen; Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh; Gesso Panels, Ingram Street Tearooms. Photo by Mike Thomson.
Margaret MacDonald Mackintosh (1864-1933), was a Scottish artist who worked in gesso, textiles, and metals. She and her sister Frances MacDonald enrolled at The Glasgow School of Art at the turn of the 20th century, and some of the first women allowed to attend classes. Later, the sisters left school to start their own studio together. Margaret MacDonald was introduced to Rennie Mackintosh, an architectural student, by the head of the Glasgow School, and Frances to Rennie’s associate, Herbert MacNair. After each pair married, they were known as the Glasgow Four.
The partnership of Rennie Mackintosh and Margaret MacDonald Mackintosh was sometimes characterized as all Rennie with Margaret as a supportive wife, but Mackintosh himself attributed much of their creativity to their interactions, their work together. They collaborated on more than 40 exhibitions, and numerous interiors. In 1927, he wrote her, “You must remember that in all my architectural efforts you have been half if not three-quarters of them.” He believed that Margaret had genius, whereas he had only talent.(Alan Senior)
Margaret MacDonald was the first Margaret to inspire me to do a Margaret’s Board on Pinterest. She also shows up in my Dynamic Duos board. The more Stratoz and I collaborate in our art, the more curious I get about other artistic and creative partnerships. Have you ever been inspired by another person in your own creativity? Known any Dynamic Duos?
Margarete Heymann Löbenstein Marks (German, 1899–1990), Tea Service, ca. 1930. Milwaukee Art Museum, Purchase, Decorative Arts Deaccession Fund, M2011.17.1-.21. Image from Wright auction (Chicago, IL).
My quest to find Margarets for my Pinterest Board led me to an artist who had a proliferation of names, variously Margaret, Margit, Margarete, or Grete, and Heymann then Loebenstein(her first husband who was killed in a car accident in 1928), then Marks(her second husband). It took me awhile to realize this was all the same person. A name becomes so entwined with identity, yet she is called by so many, depending on the author. Her final name seems to have been Grete Marks, so that is what I will call her.
Grete Marks was born Margarete Heymann in Germany in 1899, and studied at the Bauhaus school of design, where she was pressured by the administration to be a weaver rather than a potter, because she was a woman. Marks prevailed, and when she married Gustav Lobenstein, they opened a pottery together. When Lobenstein died, she took over the company herself, but had to flee Germany. She was Jewish, and the Nazi’s called her work “degenerate,” and forced her to sell the factory at a loss in 1934. A former client brought her to England, with her two sons, where again Marks worked The Potteries at Stoke-on-Trent. Her singular vision, and imaginative shapes did not sit well with the traditional ceramics industry in English countryside, and the Pottery let her go.
A bowl and a teapot designed by Margarete Heymann in 1930. Sotheby’s
When you think of “tea set” from 1930’s England, these are not what come to mind. No flowers. No gilded edges. Look at those delicious colors below, luminous yellow, with robin’s egg blue glowing from the inside.
Tea Set by Margarete Heymann Loebenstein Marks
Marks moved to London and continued to make pottery, and also started painting. According to Collection Soehlke, she also made “pottery pictures” with pieces of broken pottery. I couldn’t find any photos of her pottery pictures, and the mosaic artist in me wants to see what they looked like, a manifestation of a desire to reunite a fractured career and life.
Margaret Armstrong(1867-1944), designed over 270 book covers during her career. I am drawn to her swirling designs, detailed flowers, and love of gold and silver imprinting, and deep rich binding colors. She and a group of female friends traveled around the western states from 1911-1914, and took a trip to the bottom of the Grand Canyon(the first white women to do so), and went on to write and illustrate Field Book to Western Wildflowers. (Printed Flower Gardens)
I was interested to discover, since Stratoz makes stained glass, that Armstrong’s father was a well-known stained glass artist who worked with Tiffany, Maitland Armstrong, along with Margaret’s sister Helen Armstrong, using a technique of “plating” where glass is stacked in order to modulate the light. I also covet her monogram, since it is the same letters of my own, and I love the interlocking type.
“She started a vogue for making the book covers themselves artistic and distinctive, and her covers became a sort of identity tag for the author. Whenever I see the dark blue and gold design on the spine of some book on a library shelf I have recognized it as Henry van Dyke’s even before Margaret’s distinctive lettering tells me so.”
How to Know the Wildflowers. Cover by Margaret Armstrong.
Tent on the Beach. Cover by Margaret Armstrong
Love finds the way. Cover by Margaret Armstrong
Days Off. Cover by Margaret Armstrong.
Pippa Passes. Cover by Margaret Armstrong.
Sleepy Hollow. Cover by Margaret Armstrong.
How to Know the Ferns. Cover by Margaret Armstrong.
Margaret De Patta at work, 1948 / George Straus, photographer. Margaret De Patta papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
One of the pleasures of Pinterest is finding themes for different “boards” and one I created on impulse was “Margarets.” I haven’t know many Margarets, especially ones who might actually go by the full name and not a nickname. Fortuitously, there are some very cool women named Margaret, and the first in my series is the art jeweler Margaret De Patta(1903-1964). She attended Academy of Fine Arts in San Diego, studied metalsmithing, and and had her own studio by 1935. I love this photo of De Patta at work, wearing one of her own sculptural brooches. She was part of of a 1948 exhibit, Modern Jewelry under 50 Dollars at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, with the emphasis on modernist jewelry as wearable art, and in fact, De Patta studied Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, who was a teacher at the Bauhaus in Berlin. According to Marbeth Schon, “De Patta’s work shows the influence of Maholy-Nagy in her use of semi-transparent stones which manipulate light and especially her silver pin with stainless steel screen which bears a resemblance to a Moholy-Nagy photogram. Moholy-Nagy had experimented with three-dimensional construction, light modulator, space modulators, the transition of light through plastic sheets and kineticism.”
Margaret De Patta, Silver pin exhibited: Modern Jewelry under fifty dollars, 1948
Community of Creatives and Mobilia Gallery have some great photos of Margaret De Patta’s pieces, and their capturing of light.
If you are fortunate to live near the Oakland Museum of California, you may have seen the exhibit Space-Light-Structure: The Jewelry of Margaret De Patta, February 4, 2012 – May 13, 2012.
Sheila Hicks. American,1934- Zapallar, 1957-58 wool 9 1/4″ x 4 3/4″ Private collection Photograph by: Bastiaan van den Berg
I have a fondness for orange combined with pink. Pink is not my favorite color, so there must be something about orange that transforms it for me!
Chinese Coins Quilt Pattern in Mosaic by Margaret Almon
“Textiles had been relegated to a secondary role in our society, to a material that was either functional or decorative. I wanted to give it another status and show what an artist can do with these incredible materials.”
Sheila Hicks. Sumo Balls. Photo: Massimo Vignelli AssociatesSilky Rainforest. Sheila Hicks. Renwick Museum of Craft. Photo by Wayne Stratz.
I first saw a piece by Sheila Hicks while on vacation to DC, and the colors were mesmerizing. It turns out she studied with painter Josef Albers at Yale, who was influential in color theory, and was friends with Anni Albers, fiber artist, and then she won a Fulbright to Chile to study weaving, and fiber and color became the essentials of her vision. The Mint Museum of Craft & Design is hosting the exhibit Sheila Hicks: Fifty Years, until January 29, 2012. I am also smitten that The Mint Museum has a Wiki created by their Library staff, with information about exhibits, which appeals to my librarian self.
What colors are transformed for you when put together?
The Dragon of Ignorance by Hildreth Meiere, 1939 New York World’s Fair Medicine and Public Health Building. Hippocrates was shown battling the Dragon. Photo by Wayne Stratz. .
Glass Cutter’s Jacket made of Kevlar, invented by Stephanie Kwolek. Photo by Wayne Stratz.
October 7th is Ada Lovelace Day, and the Finding Ada Project. Ada Lovelace worked with Charles Babbage on an Analytical Engine in 1842, and Lovelace wrote something akin to the first programs for this forerunner of the modern computer. Ada Lovelace Day was founded in 2009 by Suw Charman-Anderson, a social technologist, journalist and writer who was tired of the tech industry’s excuses regarding the lack of women speakers at conferences.
Ada Lovelace Day aims to raise the profile of women in science, technology, engineering and maths by encouraging people around the world to talk about the women whose work they admire. This international day of celebration helps people learn about the achievements of women in STEM, inspiring others and creating new role models for young and old alike. The inspiration for Ada Lovelace Day came from psychologist Penelope Lockwood, who carried out a study which found that women need to see female role models more than men need to see male role models.
I knew I wanted to use this photo from my and Stratoz’s visit to the Smithsonian, of a glass-cutter’s jacket made of Kevlar, which was invented by Stephanie Kwolek, as part of her work at DuPont, in 1965. Being glass artists, we were both drawn to this jacket! The holes, though counter-intuitive, are to ventilate the Kevlar, which is heavy and hot. The image of a bullet proof vest since it came to the market in 1975 has become part of our culture, but the fact that a woman invented the fiber has not. Stephanie Kwolek was born in 1927, in New Kensington, PA(a Pennsylvanian!), and loved to draw, and wanted to be a fashion designer. Then she considered medical school, and took chemistry in preparation and loved it. There were opportunities for her because of WWII and the need for women to work in the sciences, while men were at war. She was hired by DuPont, and tenaciously stayed after the war was over, and in fact until she retired.
Kwolek worked with polymers, and was experimenting with ways to reinforce tires, and found a polymer that wouldn’t melt, and when she added a solvent, it didn’t have the usual consistency of molasses, but more like water. Intrigued, she took it to the man in charge of the spineret, who was not interested in spinning something that flowed like water, but she persisted, and finally he consented, and it spun beautifully. I love the evolution of her dream of designing to fashion, to spinning polymers that eventually became the substance five times stronger than steel, and can stop a bullet, and has saved over 3000 lives.
Stephanie Kwolek, chemist and inventor of Kevlar, the material of bullet proof vests
