Mariska Karasz was a serious artist of the fiber kind. Whether through children's fashion or expressionist wall tapestries, Mariska armed herself with needles, cloth and thread to create wonderful and revolutionary things. Born in 1898, Mariska Karasz was a child of a new century, one of growing urbanization, modernism, progressive art, and changing identity. At the age of sixteen, Mariska moved to New York City from Budapest, Hungary and became a successful fashion desginer by molding her innate traditional Hungarian styles with a modern American identity. After the first world war, the state of American fashion and art broke away from the European standards, especially that which manifested from Paris. Without the pressure to follow trends from establlished fashion houses, Maraiska was able to implement her own definitions of modernity with Eastern European peasant art. 

 

 

After World War II, during the rise of American Studio Craft and Abstract Expressionism as art movements, she began working with fibers as an artist, such as silk, cotton, line, wool, hemp, horsehair and even wood. By creating abstract embroidered wall hangings, she moved away from the useable purposes of textiles to the purely decorative and artistic. Her art, like herself, held a dual citizenship. Her tapestries belonged just as much within the privacy of the home as it did in the public space of a gallery. Her craft was engendered, domestic, and traditional while simultaneously worldly and priveledged- existing within the realm of art and the houshold. 

During the 1950'S Mariska, displayed her art in museums and galleries across the nation. She also authored the book Adventures in Stitches: A New Art of Embroidery in 1949 and worked as guest needlework editor at House Beautiful in 1952-53, introducing artistic embroidery to a vast audience. She is credited with encouraging a revival of needlework in America and initiating a creative and modern approach to the field. Her early work in embroidery was highly detailed of representational images of portraits, landscapes, and still lifes. Later in her career she broke away to more abstract, expressionist, and even playful creations like the net of fish pictured above.Mariska died in 1960 of cancer, leaving behind 40 years of groundbreaking beautiful work.