Mariska Karasz

Mariska Karasz (1898, Budapest, Hungary - 1960, Danbury, Connecticut) was a Hungarian-American fashion designer, author, and textile artist.

Karasz learned to sew as a young girl in Hungary. She moved to New York in 1914 and 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. In the early 1930s, after her marriage to Donald Peterson and the births of her two daughters, Solveig and Rosamond, 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.

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 60 solo shows during the 1950s. Her increasingly 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.^{[citation needed]}

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 1952-1953.

The first retrospective of her work took place at the Georgia Museum of Art from January 20 to April 15, 2007.

External links

• Exhibit at Georgia Museum of Art
• "Rozsika", embroidery on cotton, 1947

References

• Callahan, Ashley: Modern Threads: Fashion and Art by Mariska Karasz. Athens, GA: Georgia Museum of Art, 2007.
• Biography at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, retrieved 28 June 2007

Persondata
Name	Karasz, Mariska
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Date of birth	1898
Place of birth
Date of death	1960
Place of death