Mariska Karasz

Critics repeatedly praised her for her skillful and unusual use of color, her creative combinations of materials, and her inspiring efforts to promote a modern approach to embroidery.

• Name — Mariska Karasz • Birthplace — Budapest, Hungary • Died — 27 August 1960 • Place of death — Danbury, Connecticut • Field — Fashion design, Textile Art, Writing • Spouse — Donald Peterson Mariska Karasz (born Mariska Kárász; 1898 – August 27, 1960) was a Hungarian-American fashion designer, author, and textile artist. She created colorful, patterned garments largely inspired by the folk art of her native country. Her abstract wall hangings mixing fibers such as silk, cotton, wool, and hemp with horsehair and wood garnered her extensive national, and even international, attention. Critics repeatedly praised her for her skillful and unusual use of color, her creative combinations of materials, and her inspiring efforts to promote a modern approach to embroidery.

• Illustration — Detail of Alchemy (1953), wall panel executed on silk with yarns from Pola Stout Karasz learned to sew as a young girl in Hungary. She immigrated to New York City in 1914 at the age of sixteen. Karasz was the younger sister of industrial designer and New Yorker cover artist Ilonka Karasz. She taught herself embroidery, utilizing her family, animals, and the natural world surrounding her studio in Brewster, New York, as subject matter. As her talent developed, her pieces became increasingly abstract and refined. After studying at Cooper Union Art School, she sold some of her handmade blouses in Wanamaker's department store, where it performed so well the store gave Mariska her own department. Mariska soon established a successful career as a fashion designer. Her foreign background and new American identity defined her custom clothing for women in the 1920s, which combined Hungarian folk elements with a modern American style. She traveled to Europe annually to see the latest collections of new couture, adding to her understanding of international influence. She described in a 1929 interview that sometimes, “When there is a modern play in which modern costumes are important, I am asked to design them.” While on a trip to California in 1928 where she was presenting her designs at several venues in the Los Angeles Area, she met her soon to be husband, Donald Peterson. He was a young naval lieutenant, and they married only a month later. They lived in New York City and often vacationed in Brewster, New York at a family plot given to them by her sister and her husband. After the births of her two daughters, Solveig (1931) and Rosamond (1932) she was quoted as saying she was, “appalled at the belaced and beruffled clothes that were on the market for children.” Karasz began designing modern children's clothing, which was admired by parents, scholars, and critics for its practicality and originality. Her career in fashion ended in the early 1940s, following a studio fire and the entry of the United States into World War II when she could no longer travel to Europe because of the political and social unrest. She then began journeying to Mexico and Guatemala to find folk needlework. After visiting Bolivia for a short time to gather materials and visit a friend, Mariska Karasz died from lung cancer on August 27, 1960 in Danbury, Connecticut at 62 years old. Throughout her life she used colors, textures, and art that conveyed her love of her home country and that of the vibrant American landscape of her new home. Her obituary ran in The New York Times, Handweaver & Craftsman, Interiors, and Craft Horizons. “Her unfailing generosity to craftsmen and laymen interested in needlework,” Craft Horizons wrote about Karasz on a later occasion, contributed to “her eminence as a truly modern needlewoman who attained the rank of artist.”

In 1947, during the rise of American studio craft and abstract expressionism, Karasz began creating embroidered wall hangings. She exhibited her work in museums and galleries across the county, in over 50 solo shows during the 1950s. She also authored the book Adventures in Stitches in 1949 (republished in an expanded version in 1959), an influential book on creative needlework, and served as guest needlework editor for House Beautiful from 1952 to 1953. Karasz has been frequently left out of contemporary accounts of craft history. Her contributions had mostly been forgotten by the end of the 20th century, a phenomenon common to female artists. The feminist reexamination of embroidery in the 1970s, as demonstrated by Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party, was even unable to address this omission.“Stitchery,” as creative embroidery has come to be called, continues to be of interest to artists and hobbyists. Books such as David B. Van Dommelen’s Decorative Wall Hangings: Art with Fabric (1962), and Jacqueline Enthoven’s The Stitches of Creative Embroidery (1964) pay homage to Karasz’s instrumental role in the medium’s revival. The first retrospective of her work took place at the Georgia Museum of Art from January 20 to April 15, 2007. In 2010 her work was included in the exhibition "Textiles Recycled/Reimagined" at the Baltimore Museum of Art.