Margaret De Patta (née Strong; 1903–1964) was an American jewelry designer and educator, active in the mid-century jewelry movement.
Early life and education She was born in 1903 in Tacoma, Washington, and grew up in San Diego, California, the eldest of three daughters born to Hal and Mary Strong.
De Patta attended the San Diego Academy of Fine Arts from 1921 until 1923. Then from 1923 to 1925 she attended the San Francisco Art Institute (formerly known as the California School of Fine Arts) and studied sculpture and painting. From 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.
She later returned to San Francisco and apprenticed with Armin Hairenian at the Art Copper Shop, as well as taught herself the art of jewelry-making.
Career Her innovative jewelry was influenced by the "Bauhaus school, constructivism, and democratic ideals". She married Sam De Patta in 1929. 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 with the help of Francis Sperisen, a lapidary in San Francisco . She called her stones "opticuts". De Patta took inspiration from "Egyptian, Turkish, Etruscan, and Mayan jewelry" when creating her pieces.
Her jewelry was featured in the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition (GGIE) in San Francisco. In 1946 her work was included in the exhibition Modern Handmade Jewelry at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. For many years she lived in a house on Laidley Street in Glen Park, which was extensively remodeled after the 1940s.
In 1941, she studied under László Moholy-Nagy at the IIT Institute of Design (formerly known as the School of Design) in Chicago, Illinois. She met her second husband, the industrial designer Eugene "Gene" Bielawski, at the Institute of Design, and they married in 1946. In the 1940s she taught trade school classes in San Francisco with Bielawski, but the pair were blacklisted from that work for "Communist leanings". She struggled alongside Bielawski after they set up a Napa-based studio, to start a reasonably priced mass-produced jewelry line for the public.
In 1951, De Patta led the founding of the Metal Arts Guild of San Francisco and served as its first president. De Patta taught art classes at the California Labor School, and silversmithing, forging and lost-wax casting at the College of Marin. One of her students was Irena Brynner.
Death and legacy She died in 1964 in a hotel room in San Francisco, from a suicide. She had left notes bequeathing all of her major works before she died.
After Bielawski's death in 2002, much of De Patta's work and materials were donated to the Oakland Museum of California. Her work is held by major museums including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others.
In 1999, her abstract photography work was included in a group exhibition, The Photogram 1918–1948, at Ubu Gallery, New York City.
In 2012, the Museum of Arts and Design and the Oakland Museum of California co-organized the first major retrospective of her work titled Space-Light-Structure: The Jewelry of Margaret De Patta, curated by Ursula Ilse-Neuman and Julie M. Muñiz. This exhibition included more than 60 pieces of jewelry, ceramics, flatware, photographs, and pictograms.
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).
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