Margaret De Patta

She was born in 1903 in Tacoma, Washington,[2] and grew up in San Diego, California, the eldest of three daughters born to Hal and Mary Strong.[3]

De Patta attended the San Diego Academy of Fine Arts from 1921 until 1923.[4] Then from 1923 to 1925 she attended the San Francisco Art Institute (formally known as California School of Fine Arts) and studied sculpture and painting.[1][5][4] In 1926 until 1929, De Patta received a scholarship to attend the Art Students League of New York, where she encountered the work of the European avant-garde.[1][4]

She later returned to San Francisco and apprenticed with Armin Hairenian at the Art Copper Shop,[5][6] as well as taught herself the art of jewelry-making.[1]

Her innovative jewelry was influenced by the "Bauhaus school, constructivism, and democratic ideals".[7] She married Sam De Patta in 1929.[4] De Patta first began experimenting with jewelry in 1929 when she made her own wedding ring.[8][9] She was known for her innovative use of visual effects in her jewelry, such as light refraction, image reflection, and magnification, which she achieved through the design of her stones.[10] She called her stones "opticuts".[10]

Her jewelry was featured in the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition (GGIE) in San Francisco. For many years she lived in a house on Laidley Street house in Glen Park, which was extensively remodeled after 1940s.[4][11]

In 1941, she studied under László Moholy-Nagy at the IIT Institute of Design (formally known as the School of Design) in Chicago, Illinois.[1] She met her second husband, industrial designer Eugene "Gene" Bielawski at IIT Institute, they were married in 1946.[1][12] In the 1940s she taught trade school classes in San Francisco with Bielawski however they were blacklisted from their work for "Communist leanings".[13] She struggled alongside Bielawski after they set up a Napa-based studio, to start a reasonably priced mass-produced jewelry line for the public.[13][14][15]

In 1951, De Patta led the founding of the Metal Arts Guild of San Francisco, she also served as the first president.[16] De Patta taught art classes at the California Labor School, and silversmithing, forging and lost-wax casting at the College of Marin.[17][18] One of her students was Irena Brynner.[18]

She died in 1964 in a hotel room in San Francisco, from a suicide.[13][19] She had left notes bequeathing all of her major works before she passed.[13]

After Bielawski's death in 2002, much of De Patta's work and materials were donated to the Oakland Museum of California.[13][20] Her work is collected in many major museums including the Smithsonian American Art Museum,[21] the Los Angeles County Museum of Art,[22] among others.

The first major retrospective of her work, Space-Light-Structure: The Jewelry of Margaret De Patta, opened at the Museum of Arts and Design in 2012 and travelled to the Oakland Museum of California that same year.[13][1]

In 1999, her abstract photography work was included in a group exhibition, The Photogram 1918–1948, at Ubu Gallery, New York City.[23] The Velvet da Vinci gallery in San Francisco held an exhibition of her jewelry in 2012, The De Patta Project: New Jewelry Made With Old Stones Acquired from the Estate of Margaret De Patta (1903–1964).[13]