Mariska Karasz (1898-1960)

Mariska Karasz was a Hungarian-American fashion designer, author, and textile artist.

She learned to sew as a young girl in her native 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 Karasz began designing modern children’s clothing, which was admired for its practicality and originality.

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 fibres 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.

Her 1949 book Adventures in Stitches (republished in an expanded version in 1959), was an important influence on creative needlework.