 Welcome, welcome. My name is Caroline Bowman. I'm the director at Cooper Hewitt's Smithsonian Design Museum, and I am really thrilled to be here introducing our speakers tonight and celebrating the absolutely stunning publication, Margarita Murgentine, American Textiles' Modern Ideas, a timely examination of the pioneer designer and her stylistic impact on American design. Cooper Hewitt's outstanding and diverse collection of textiles includes, believe it or not, over 26,000 works spanning 24 centuries and five continents, from the humble and homemade to the latest in wearable technology. In the domestic sphere, we hold 137 examples of placemats, table runners, napkins, and tablecloths, and I am delighted to share, we recently acquired Murgentine 1939 Spensarian Horses, the first of her textiles to enter our collection. Murgentine was among a group of influential designers who challenged the long-held assumptions that American designers could only copy, not create. Rarely seen works of her, of her fellow members of the American Union of decorative artists and craftsmen, organized to promote American modern design. And they're on view in our current exhibition, The Jazz Age, American Style in the 1920s. I hope you got up there before the talk tonight. Along with Donald Deskey's drawing for his party ashtray textiles, and Paul Frankel's skyscraper bouquet desk, there is the ingenious David Frederick Keisler design from Murgentine's New York apartment that is now in the museum's permanent collection. Long before Lily Pulitzer and Vera Bradley, Murgentine established herself as a household name and a major brand designing everything from household linens to cookware to dress fabrics. I love the fact that on the 1940 U.S. Census, Murgentine stated her profession as industrial designer, because she really embraced the challenge of bringing good design to the mass market. Murgentine once asked, quote, are you allergic to meaningless, uninspired patterns in print cloth? Her textiles were intellectual, witty, even political and wildly popular in American homes. I was lucky enough to get a glimpse of Murgentine's original pieces with her granddaughter, Virginia Byer, recently, and I must say I really didn't want the meeting to conclude. That we have this valuable biography is due to the fact that Virginia, a contributor to the publication and a dear friend of Cooper Hewitt, discovered a treasure trove of Murgentine materials stored away in her mother's home, which led Virginia to embark on several years of research into the life and career of her designer grandmother and the design world of the 1930s. The book's designer, Linda Florio, is principal of Florio Design, an award-winning visual branding and graphic design studio. Linda, who also contributed the essay on Murgentine's innovative use of type, has designed over 100 publications, including The Eternal Letter, which received the 2016 Independent Publisher Book Award for most outstanding design. Also a contributor in the book's editor, Donna Gulletter, is an independent textile and costume historian who contributed chapters to Myra Coleman, various illuminations of a crazy world cut, joined this evening by Matilda McQuade, who is head of textiles and deputy curatorial director here at Cooper Hewitt. Following tonight's conversation, there will be a book signing upstairs outside the shop, where the book will be available for purchase. It is by my bed on my night table, and I encourage all of you to take home a copy tonight. So please welcome me. Please welcome Virginia Byer, Linda Florio, and Donna Gulletter to the stage. Thank you. Good evening and really a tremendous thanks to Carolyn and to Matilda and everyone here at the Cooper Hewitt for your interest, your support, and for this opportunity to be able to present the work of my incredible grandmother. What an amazing experience it's been for me over these last several years, to find the grandmother who I never knew because she died before I was born, and yet was so well known and so creative in her brief lifetime. Fortunately, we have her work and her words, and you will see and hear them all tonight. So who was this incredibly innovative, modern, and forward-thinking, female-designed pioneer? She was born in York in 1894. By 1915, she was a young wife and mother, and by all appearances, a very conventional one. A decade later, however, in the mid-1920s, with her daughters now in school, she resumed her art education and began focusing on textile design. Marguerita had a warm and very engaging personality, coupled with diverse interests from American history to sailing to gardening and typography. She developed many linen collections referencing those interests, but there are three common threads that run through them all, color, unusual motifs, and conversation. It's best to use her own words to sum up her approach. She admonished in 1934, Be courageous about color to make it do its best tricks for you. If you are afraid or half-hearted, it will defeat you. And in 1940, she told art students to be daring, provocative, and to pioneer with new symbols. With subject matter drawn from pop culture, history, hobbies, and politics, all provoked lively table talk. She began designing silk fabrics for cone-haul marks and bathing caps, shower curtains, and beach accessories for climbers. On the left is a page of her work from the book Modern American Design, published in 1930, by the American Union of Deferred Artists and Craftsmen, who Carolyn mentioned, also known by its acronym AUTAC. And on the right is an existing piece of the fabric used for the beach bag. The AUTAC was formed in 1928 to promote an American style of modernism through the work of its members, and Marguerita became a member in 1929. As Carolyn said, the membership was a who's who of modern design world, and you can see the works by more than a dozen AUTAC members upstairs in the Jazz Age show. Such, including such luminaries as Frank Lloyd Wright, Frederick Keasler, Donald Deskey, Alonca Carras, Gilbert Roddy, and Ruth Reaves. When Donald Deskey received the commission to do the interior of the new Radio City Music Hall in 1932, he chose a few of his AUTAC colleagues to participate, and Marguerita was one of them. It was a unique undertaking, all the more so because it was done in the depths of the Depression. And Deskey himself remarked that the interiors of the musical would be the first time a semi-public institution would present modern design to the public. For this, she did a painterly wall fabric and wall hanging called Lilies in the Air that you can see here on the left. And on the right, a carpet of irregular geometric shapes featuring line drawings of performers. If you go to the music hall today, you will still see them there on the grand lounge level 85 years after they were done. The interwar years created many changes in American domestic life. Homes and home entertainment were becoming much more informal. There was a growing middle class. Marguerita wanted to entertain friends and colleagues and found all the existing cloths banal and boring. She said, are you allergic to white tablecloths? She asked, well, so am I. For what appealed to her was pure form, interesting color, and ultimately good conversation around the dining table stimulated, as I said, by her cloth. Of all the images that you will see now, they were designed and produced in a very short period from 1934 to 1940, before an illness took her life in 1941. When she switched to textiles for the home, her range was very broad. Bath and kitchen towels, sheets and pillowcases, bedspreads and curtains. But she is most remembered for her novel table linens. Those shown here represent her first foray into table linens, and you can see her innovative embrace of ideas translated into home products. While it may not appear so to us today, they were so revolutionary that she had tremendous difficulty getting them produced. Referring to the blue polka dot cloth on the upper right, the view of which is taken from a page of House and Garden from June 1934, she recounted. This manufacturer looked at it and said, that's not a design, it's only a part of the design. Because he had never before seen a table cloth that wasn't perfectly symmetrical, and therefore he thought, I hadn't completed the design. This initial collection used geometric arrangements, blocks of color, with unusual color combinations and asymmetry, and brought those modern ideas onto the American table. They were sold at popular prices. These were for the average household, and not just the elite, and were advertised as such by D. Altman and Gimbles. Those here of a certain age will remember those stories. These same ads also prominently proclaimed them to be designed by Marguerite Mergentimes. Throughout the decades, thousands of her cloths were sold all across the country. One kitchen towel, called the Jolly Duranium, stayed in production for years and sold over a quarter of a million. These were being produced at the same time that she was working with Frederick Kiesler on the design of her ultra-modern apartment, which, incidentally, was the only residential commission of his career. The living room, which you see here, was recently recreated at MoMA in their exhibit, How Should We Live? And that exhibit also included three of Marguerite's textiles that are in the MoMA collection. A daybed from the apartment, as Carolyn said, can be seen upstairs in the Jazz Age show as well. Her designs encompass the modern and also drew from traditional folk art expressions. She very much appreciated the handiwork of American folk artists, be it in carving, metalwork, paint, or pen, and was particularly fond of the Pennsylvania Dutch. This attraction was not all that different from modern painters of that time who were looking to primitive art for inspiration. She amassed an extensive folk art collection and details from it are evident in her two folk art series. While they were traditional in their representation, they were modern in their arrangement and could fit into many types of decor. For example, the cloth on the left featured in House and Garden in June 1941 is taken from the mid-century steel pen drawing of a horse shown on the right and then placed in a colonial revival room. Representations on fracter paintings and a dower chest in her collection stimulated ideas for stylized flowers, angels, hearts, and birds. One writer commented, she established a rare artistic liaison between past and present, projecting the aesthetics of another day in a new and vital and fresh manner. She was an integral part of the New York design scene of her day and she participated in all of the topical events of that time. The last being the two world's fairs of 1939. For New York's World of Tomorrow, she mapped out an asymmetric queen's centric cloth showing New Jersey and even Manhattan in subsidiary positions. Each time I look at it, it reminds me of the famous Saul Steinberg New Yorker cover done almost 40 years later. One reason we can so appreciate her designs, even after 80 to 85 years, is that she did not decorate, she communicated. And at a time when the design cognizantie were still looking to Europe to set the standard, she promoted American ideals, daily life, pop culture, and even political parlance. Soon you will see a political slogan cloth she designed in 1936. We can only imagine the slogans that would grace such a cloth today in 2017. A recent blog post said, you may find it hard to remember her name, but her work is unforgettable. This spirited grandmother of mine left us an artistic and cultural legacy, perhaps even more necessary today than when it was done in the 1930s. It's a legacy that brought color and optimism, American ideas and ideals, good design and conversation right into the heart of the American home. And now Donna is going to tell us more about it. The topic of my section is I thought all tablecloths of war, particularly the white. As Virginia mentioned, Murgentine began designing tablecloths, but she couldn't find any that she liked for her own use. And when we began our research, we were looking for Murgentine's work as it was published in newspapers and magazines and books. And at the same time, Virginia and her cousins were going through, digging through their family photographs and papers to see what had been besides the textiles had been stored away, but archival material as well. And one of the most exciting items that they unearthed was the talk that Murgentine gave to young design students at St. Edward College in 1940. And this talk turned out to be a key document for us because we'd already been doing our research for quite a while. And it summed up exactly what we had deduced about how she was thinking about design. And then here it was typed up in her own words. And in this talk she told the students exactly what compelled her to begin designing the table linens in 1934. She said, white damask, white lace and embroidery, the ubiquitous white was the color for formal and informal entertainment. There were a few faded pastels to be seen, but they didn't amount to much. I thought all table calls were particularly the white. Once Murgentine set out to remedy this situation, it didn't take her long to gain recognition. In addition to table linens such as her geometric designs in 1934 and 1935, she had also designed sheets with large polka dots and a highly successful striped towel from Mar-Tex. Here is her striped cloth, titled Two-Timing, as was featured in House Beautiful in February 1935. By May of that same year, there was a profile of her in Decorator's Digest. It begins, to anyone interested in design, it is hardly necessary to introduce Mar-Gurine and Murgentine. Her position as a designer and as an authority in the field of table appointments have won her national fame. Pages of matter and photographs have been printed about her in her work, and lectures and radio talks are eagerly awaited by vast audiences of art and admirers all over the United States. And then it continued to discuss the impact she had stymistically. And it said, colors and periods and styles are now all being combined to gain variety. How much change can be attributed directly to Mar-Gurine and Murgentine is problematical. Nevertheless, her influence in extending it has been indeed far-reaching in its scope, especially in dining room, bedroom and bathroom appointments. The result has been the creation of distinctive smart modern things from old media. To see how Murgentine changed from this past aesthetic of white to her bold colors and patterns, I'm going to talk about the hundred years of American design series that Murgentine did in 1936 for Lord and Taylor. It's a good example of her approach as she was using sources from the past, this old media that was mentioned, and looking back to 1836 and bringing it up to the present when the series was launched in 1936. As you can see from these textiles and ads, it includes a span of styles and illustrates how she viewed these diverse motifs altogether as a collection. She presented them to American consumers so they would have linens to choose from beyond the ubiquitous white and faded Pascal. Murgentine spent several months studying and researching for this collection. From her research, she selected motifs and shaped them for the current market wanting to produce in-panel tangled linens that were sold at department stores and as Virginia said, at reasonable prices. As with everything Murgentine did, her choices and motifs reflect her interest in American history, politics and language. Within this hundred year series, it was divided into three historical periods. It begins in 1836 with the Jacksonian group. For this, Murgentine focused on two design sources. One is the iconic little red schoolhouse, not a surprising choice since Murgentine had taken classes at Teachers College and was interested in current ideas about education as well as the American democratic ideal of education for everyone. She also chose motifs from 19th century quilts for this work. From these domestic items for the bed, Murgentine turned their geometric patterns into small rectangular pieces of cloth that reach approximately five by seven inches. These were then used for the domestic ritual of the 1930s, cocktails. You can see in the Jazz Age show that this ritual inspired many 20th century designers. For Murgentine, quilts in schoolhouses were part of her lifelong interest in American folk art. In the hundred years of design series, the second part of the 19th century is represented by Victorian styles of clothing and textiles including this tablecloth on the left titled Gentile Elegance with motifs of lace and bows from Victorian lingerie. Here's this somewhat dainty cloth is seen in this surrealist inspired table setting and a photograph taken by Emily Danielson with a bird cage and hands holding cutlery. And there's also a group ornamented with Lily of the Valleys that is called Ladies Delight. See on the right. In this Victorian group, Murgentine was allowing for a more feminine style and in some cases colors as well but she was also experimenting with bringing a wide variety of colors to the dining table. The Ladies Delight series is printed in pink and claret but we know from the Lorna Taylor advertisement that it also came in tophers with brown and light blue with indigo. The New Yorker magazine was a fan of Murgentine and features her work in its on and off the Avenue column as highlights of what was being offered to shoppers in New York. The New Yorker wrote about this hundred years of design series in their October 3rd, 1936 issue and said, Law Murgentine has dipped into American history this time for her color effects as well as for design and inspiration and the results are an achievement which would keep her inflated with pride for an indefinite period. It includes the first to be done in Victorian designs which won't stick out like sore thumbs in the rooms of the period. I like Little Red Schoolhouse, Ladies Delight and for that matter I like the whole series. It was noted in several magazines such as the New Yorker that Murgentine's designs work with furniture venue period from colonial revival to modern. Murgentine's own apartment illustrates this. So this image shows Murgentine's dining room with the table and chairs that were designed by Frederick Keesler. These chairs are chromium plated steel tubes and white leather and three-legged. The table and Murgentine's ultra-modern dining room furnishing is that what her Victorian inspired Ladies Delight placements. And for the series, the third period was the modern day 1936 time of President Roosevelt. To represent it, Murgentine used her typographic tablecloth of political slogans called Food for Thought which itself features slogans from the past to the present. It's one of her most surprising and innovative pieces and as Linda will now tell you, it puts Murgentine into the category not only of American textile designer but also of graphic designer. Thank you. In 1936, Murgentine designed the Food for Thought tablecloth complete with an answered booklet clarifying the words she used. The booklet, as superimposed here on the cloth, defines brain trust, plowed under, bust the trust, tippy canoe and Tyler tube, boondoggle, go west, young man, go west, and many more. Political and campaign slogans and government agency abbreviations form the design and fit the cloth as it draped over a table. The information available wherever people were seated. Murgentine combined her infatuation with American history by using words and type and as an integral part of the design demonstrating her compositional skills and interests in communication. American history also led Murgentine to study Pennsylvania folk art and in particular, fractures which are calligraphic drawings filled with hand-lettered symbols, motifs, and texts often executed with a goose quill. Later, steel pen alphabets and flourishes became popular. Murgentine's Spensarian alphabet napkin on the left and the Spensarian tablecloth on the right both from 1939 are directly inspired from this 19th century steel pen copy book page in the center. Always mindful of her research she signed the textiles as edited or arranged by Margarita Murgentine crediting the sources from which she drew inspiration. As Murgentine developed a stronger interest in designing with type and as her decorative textiles shifted to ones that were more communicative she engaged in the process of graphic design researching and selecting typefaces for her texts composing with them making choices in the alignment of the text stacking, centering, flush left and justified using negative and positive shapes to create pattern, rhythm, and scale all with the intention of communicating and sparking conversation. Murgentine's 1939 food quiz tablecloth complete with keyed symbols for matching questions to answers is shown here. The layout of his textiles is similar to that of a board game where the information is assembled for direct contact with the participants and in this case those sitting around the table. One could ask, is there a dessert for love? Yes, kisses. Do you dish the dirt before you dish the soup? Optional. What food sounds like a Pennsylvania battle? Philadelphia Scrapple. Group of textiles wish fulfillment cocktail napkins also designed in 1939 are studies in text image relationships an important element in graphic design mixing and matching text to illustration is challenging and Murgentine was skilled at making lively combinations these type image juxtapositions are playful and randomly composed and succeed as both readable text and surface designs. One of Murgentine's last all type textile designs is Americana shown here. Created for the international exposition in San Francisco in 1939 this bold and architectural wall hanging 123 by 54 inches uses rows of capital letters alternating with rows of lowercase cursive set in a single justified column. Murgentine collected over 1,000 Americanisms for this textile Coca Cola, Sugar Bowl, Tin Pan Alley, Yankee Doodle Fireside Chats, Orange Bowl, Dust Bowl, Rose Bowl, Thanksgiving and so on. She used type, the lettering and the words to form the design. The overall effect creates pattern, textural variety, and rhythmic color and while thoroughly modern in concept the design also welcomes the viewer's participation and as witnessed by Murgentine groups of people in front of Americana laughing, chuckling and pointing amused by the idea. Murgentine's typographic cloth shows cloths show the unique ways a textile artist situated herself within the field of graphic design. These monogram bath towels illustrated with a large bold capital, sans serif W with a drop shadow were designed by Murgentine in 1935. This likely may have been the start of her typographic journey, one that fulfilled her personal preference. I like type and the printed word for design. Thank you very, very much. I think we've all learned an amazing amount about Murgentine and Murgentine and I think it's been my first, when I first encountered Virginia, I think it was two years ago, three years ago Marilyn Friedman introduced us as someone who I might be interested in terms of textiles and so I paid a visit and was overcome with the amazing textiles especially that last piece we saw in Americana which was I've never seen anything like it so it was such a treat and it was great that our master's program even got involved in this so if there's any master students out there there's always a research project that you just, well it's always a surprise and I think they've learned an awful lot from you and all that period but I want to ask one question because it's a mystery to me how the three of you got together to do this project I mean I know Donna in a different capacity than I met Linda but I have no idea how you all got together so explain okay I'll start you can chime in it was serendipitous and organic at the same time you can reconcile those two things I would say the journey of this book from my perspective began around the year 2000 when there was an exhibit about women designers in the 20th century and Margarita was not in it and when I inquired I was told well they knew her name but they really didn't know what she did and that kind of stuck in the back of my mind and eight years later when my mother passed away I found things in the apartment some of which I hadn't seen in probably 50 years some of the things I had never seen before and I that that comment came back to me and I started to research and think more about it so I got in touch with my cousins and I asked them and we started to compile an inventory and one day one of my cousins Susie received an email from Donna and asking her are you the person who posted online a picture of an amazing cloth by Margarita Bergenkine and so my cousin answered yes Donna had found the right person but you should really speak to my cousin Virginia because she's much more interested in this stuff and in New York and in New York Susie was in Milwaukee so she forwarded the email to me and Donna and I spoke and I said alright come on over and Linda and Donna came over and that was how we met and later we went to Radio City Music Hall and they had an art deco tour where you can see all the different parts and we went to see Margarita's things which you saw tonight and I don't know that we started to get to know each other and one day after maybe eight months or so we got together again we were talking to do a little book which ended up being not such a little book after all because we found so much material that the book just there's just one thing I would like to include that Virginia is leaving out which for Donna and I I think was the most astonishing part of meeting Virginia is when we saw the collection we really could not believe it and even though I think we were pretty gushy at Virginia's we walked away and thought about this and discussed this so often afterwards and how exciting we thought the textiles were and in all honesty we could have come into you know lots of pale blues and pale pink textiles instead these were modern bold she was definitely a modernist and I think that we felt this energy in her work and both Donna and I could not stop thinking about it so I think that as we spoke more and engaged more with Virginia I think at the back of our minds was these amazing textiles and what could we do with them if anything well just to add we when we started we didn't know where it was going to lead to we had a perfect team here which was quite wonderful Virginia didn't know she was going to become a researcher in the textiles scholar but she has we went through a great process together that was quite wonderful but we didn't know where it was going to lead and then we decided to do the book and we kept on earthing seven we knew a certain amount and then like as we mentioned Margarita we discovered she was featured in the things you saw in New York in her the New Yorker house but then there was more there was Vogue, there were newspaper columns that were syndicated across the country that she was speaking all across so it really did we knew we had something wonderful to start with like Linda was saying but it turned into even something more wonderful and larger well when you were doing your research I'm curious like how she got some of these commissions did she present people with designs were totally from scratch original to her did she I mean I assume they were but in terms of you know like I don't know I think one of the companies was at Mar-Tex did they have some ideas about how they wanted her to design the tablecloth if they say we need a floral or we need something abstract or was it completely up to her well we don't know exactly her relationship with the company except in certain instances and so in this she does say in one document in what Virginia the quote Virginia said about that the manufacturer didn't know what to do with this asymmetrical cloth it is recounted that she took these original six designs and tried to find a manufacturer for them so that we do know but she had relationships with various New York City department stores and manufacturers it was quite a lot so the details of how she made all those connections but we're not surprised Margarita made those connections because she was determined because even in the in her collection there was a lot of variety and diversity I mean she did swirls but then she did very geometrics and abstract pieces even some symmetrical pieces but not not a lot but I'm just curious like she must have had an incredible capacity for ideas and design in general one of her comments that we love is that also in that talk that Donna and I both referenced she said that she's often asked where her ideas come from and she said that the best way to get ideas is to be interested in ideas and she was interested in all kinds of ideas and we know of at least a dozen manufacturers who did her who manufactured these pieces because after she died my mother and my aunt put together a scrapbook on a grandfather and showing the majority not all of her work and also noting who the manufacturer was in each case so that's a pretty good record for us the collection was given to the Brooklyn Museum after she died including her papers and drawings but they seem to have misplaced them so we're not we can't answer but did she travel a lot do you think some of the ideas came from traveling she did travel we know and she traveled specifically to get ideas there were a few cross country trips which in those days were serious games since every leg of the train journey would take 10-20 hours but she did go out west we know she did many trips to Pennsylvania Dutch country for sure where she did a lot of the collecting and we know of a trip she took down south to look at old houses in New Orleans and matches and that area and she says in one of the interviews she always had her eye out for ideas and for folk art for collection so would she travel by herself just for that reason or was she with husband or was it did she have any diaries did you come across any we have her diary as a teenager but that doesn't help with it it could tell you other things so I know one cross country trip she did do with my grandfather and my aunt that was in 1939 to go to the Golden Gate international exposition where she did remark with with great joy that as Linda said people were looking at the hanging and chuckling and pointing out their favorite Americanism the I know she on that trip she visited with Dorothy Liebes she was with other people in Los Angeles I know she went to death valley she went to Santa Fe wonderful descriptions and letters that she wrote about the colors that she saw there and how marvelous they were so and I think those trips were really for the purpose of getting ideas and what about the world's fair how did she get involved in the world's fairs in New York as well as the San Francisco and I'm not sure whether other world's fairs that she those were the two and actually when you're asking about the manufacturers we do know a little bit about how the world's fair tablecloth came to be because the New York public library holds the whole entire archives for the 1939 World's Fair and the 60s one and I was a very happy Virginia and I spent quite a lot of time there and we found a remarkable amount of information about Margarita and so that's one case where she had contacted them directly there's several letters and correspondence between her and the women who ran the department to do the merchandising and licensing for the fair and so they say to her in one of these correspondence that we don't license directly to designers we just license to manufacturers so you need to look up with the manufacturer and then we can license them so she did that and she did that tablecloth with Valani and Cohn so in this whole archives which is so extensive and unbelievable this correspondence is there the contract is there of the licensing contract there's a letter where you had to ask to license each motif so Margarita is saying I want to use this building and this building and these flags and this pavilion as these motifs can I have the license for these please and then she's given them so in that case how she got connected but she did so I think she already kind of had those relationships but actually they're also back to your original question about it now there are letters in the archives of the World's Fair where in terms of this merchandising they are introducing Margarita to department stores which are we have relationships with but specifically to the World's Fair they were also kind of setting up those connections I would add also that we also found a document there that the World's Fair people had made up a list as early as 1936 I think where they listed designers that they wanted to speak to about the fair and she was on that list and in terms of the Golden Gate it was the opposite Dorothy Libas who was the director of all the decorative arts for that exposition came to her and she recounts how Dorothy came to her studio and walked in and said I want you to do something for the fair and it has to be fabulous and it has to be big and she also mentioned all the other European designers that would be there all the other European designers that would be there that she would essentially be showing with and that's when Margarita thought what could I do that they can't and thus the 1000 Americanisms and that's how really she came up with it and it graced a beautiful spot and I think it was awarded I don't know it was awarded a very prominent spot it seems that crowds gathered in front of it because it was so engaging and they had to move it to its own wall because it was blocking the rest of the exhibit we're running out of time so I want to ask one more question and then we're going to hear Margarita Margarita time the elephant in the room in terms of a woman designer calling herself an industrial designer she was part of a very small group at least recognized at that time is there any kind of records or writings or does she ever talk about that as being a woman in the design world or how do you think she would respond to the reflection of a woman designer to that matter we didn't find anything specific to that but it was clear that she while she was participating with all the male designers of today on panels and in other projects she very much focused on women and their needs the places that she spoke at women's colleges department stores garden clubs and I assume some of these radio shows that were geared to women and she had relationships with the well-known women who were operating and working at that time she did a book early on with a woman named Nora Ulrich married to Buck Ulrich and Audac member and it was a children's book and it was very it was unusual and it was just pictures and the child was called stories, the child was supposed to write the stories and one article has some excerpts from the story that Ruth Reeves' daughter wrote in stories so they clearly had a close relationship and again Dorothy Liebes Emily Danielson many of the women of the time they were all connected to each other there was a protest in 1935 by the where the manufacturers took control of the industrial arts exhibit and took it away from the designers and the articles say that the male designers went to protest this and say that they were going to withdraw their designs from the show and then it comments that a group of their female colleagues backed them up and it was Ruth Reeves and Margarita and a bunch of other women so they clearly banded together but they also I guess they're being a woman they knew what women in terms of their clients who were the ones buying the tablecloths and they knew what they needed so that's it she referred to her tablecloths as being both gustatory and guest detour amazing play with words she was good with words she was very good with words and speaking of words we actually one of the most exciting things that we found we didn't find that it came to us was my other cousin Peggy when they were going through the attics and closets of a house that had been in their family for many many years came across a record and we had in our research found reference to a radio program on October 4th, 1939 called Woman of Tomorrow and that she was the guest on this and we searched and searched to try to find any archive of this show and just hit a wall what did they find it was an aluminum record which was a recording of that radio interview and we're going to play a piece of it for you so first you'll hear the host or hostess of the show speaking about Margarita and then you'll hear her Margarita Mergentime is one of America's best known textile designers her work has been exhibited and admired for a number of years as a matter of fact one of her latest textiles is that present on exhibit at the San Francisco exposition Miss Mergentime, incidentally is a New Yorker which in itself is quite a distinction and she's an extremely active and enthusiastic person recently she returned from a five week cross country tour during which she sought material for her American folk art collection and from the purposeful gleam in her eye I should judge she's just raring to go so that was part of the introduction and now I'm going to introduce you to my grandmother I did a project called 100 Years of American Design from President Jackson to President Grant and through the Gilded Age to our own Franklin Delano Roosevelt you were seeing a cocktail now convention set tablecloth, beach tile, face tile, almost everything well I'm still undecided as to what you're more interested in expressive accessories for the table or the history of the American people is revealed in their craftsmanship this is a rather weighty question Miss Craig I tell you something that is no longer a secret though I'm very radical with regard to table setting and as you've probably gathered from hearing descriptions of some of the things I've done like the Milky Way which runs diagonally across the table or the design of furniture and miniature on a colonial cloth to me there is no more reason for a cloth or fabric to be a stereotype design than there is for us to follow an unchanged diet every day to be able to buy fabrics for their homes in much the same manner as they buy their clothes that is with an eye to their own personality enough of questions in the audience we have a few minutes just curious speak of the microphone first if the former museum lost the archive how did you piece everything together then and what is it that they lost that was still available sorry first in their defense I don't know that it was ever entered into their collection I think it may have been part of their industrial arts study materials and so on so maybe along the way it just disappeared so we don't have the only hint of drawings you will see there is a photograph in the book where she has some sketches behind her for the radio city musical fabric but in terms of research we pieced it together from the hundreds of articles and advertisements and archival material that we found references in books and magazines and and then like we said found quite a lot more than we had initially expected to find super presentation so far exciting progressive where did she get this progressive thrust from where did she go to school she went to ethical culture school in New York and and then she took she took courses at teacher's college I think she was Donna mentioned interested in education so she studied that but she left to get married and then studied arts one more question Donna when you made the initial inquiry that felt saying did you post this image did you know who that was you just found the image fascinating well so Linda here had found an image online of Margaritas the political slogan tablecloth and showed it to me and I said well I've never I don't know who this is and then we went online and did some and actually we really wouldn't be sitting here in Virginia's cousin Susie had made a Pinterest page with some of Margaritas designs and when I recently Susie's the one who was in Wisconsin and I recently met her she was visiting New York and we got to meet and I said Susie why did you make the Pinterest page and she said why just wanted to learn how to use Pinterest and I thought people might be interested and so I googled her name and I sent her an email saying if you're the Susie Weitzman who's the grand who has this Pinterest page and is Margarita Margarita's granddaughter and that's how I don't dance what happens so it was really a shot in the dark that came to fruition so I want to thank all three of you Linda, Donna and Virginia for joining the upstay up here and for a wonderful conversation and presentation and now we're going to have some book signing by the three of them they're going to quickly go upstairs demand the desks and if you have further questions you can also ask them up here so thank you all very much