Margaret De Patta

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. as well as taught herself the art of jewelry-making. She married Sam De Patta in 1929. 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". 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. 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. She had left notes bequeathing all of her major works before she died. 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.

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).