Margaret De Patta


Margaret De Patta was born in Tacoma, Washington, and grew up in San Diego, California. She died in Oakland, California. She was an American jewelry designer active in the mid-century jewelry movement. Her innovative jewelry was influenced by the "Bauhaus school, constructivism, and democratic ideals". Her work is collected in many major museums including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Oakland Museum of California. 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. The Velvet da Vinci gallery in San Francisco showed some of her works in "The De Patta Project: New Jewelry Made With Old Stones Acquired from the Estate of Margaret De Patta."

Career

De Patta first began experimenting with jewelry in 1929 when she made her own wedding ring. 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. She called her stones "opticuts".
She struggled with her fourth husband, industrial designer Eugene Bielawski, to start a reasonably priced jewelry line for the public.

Education

In 1926, De Patta received a scholarship to attend the Art Students League in New York, where she encountered the work of the European avant-garde. She later returned to San Francisco and taught herself the art of jewelry-making.
In 1941 she studied under László Moholy-Nagy at the School of Design in Chicago, Illinois.