Meet Marguerita

Meet Marguerita, The Designer

Marguerita Mergentime (1894–1941), an American textile designer best known for printed fabrics, made her mark in the 1930s with table linens in bold colors and patterns created to enliven American households. In New York City in the 1930s, Mergentime worked with some of the best-known designers of the day, including Donald Deskey, Russel Wright, and Frederick Kiesler. Her work was featured in The New Yorker, House & Garden, House Beautiful, and Vogue, as well as newspapers across America.

Mergentime was a member of the American Union of Decorative Artists and Craftsmen (AUDAC), which included numerous influential designers whose works define twentieth-century modernism in America. In 1932, Mergentime was commissioned by Donald Deskey to create designs for Radio City Music Hall. She produced her Lilies in the Air fabric that covers the walls in the Ladies’ Lounge and a carpet, both still visible on the Grand Lounge level.

Beginning in 1934, Mergentime focused her talent on producing table linens sold at Macy’s and Lord & Taylor among several others in New York, as well as department stores throughout the country. Mergentime’s innovative table linens brought asymmetry, politics, folk art, typography, and quizzes to casual dining. In 1939 Mergentime designed a souvenir tablecloth for the New York World’s Fair, and a hanging titled Americana for the Golden Gate International Exposition, San Francisco, that lists 360 words, phrases, and names taken from both historical references and the vernacular speech and popular culture of the day.

Marguerita Mergentime’s work resides in museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art; the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum; the Brooklyn Museum; the Museum at FIT; and the Allentown Art Museum.

Her Folk Art Collection

While solidly rooted in the fast paced, industrialized, modern world, Marguerita collected handmade folk art expressions. She would often go to auctions and buy Americana wherever she could.

"Folk Art is considered the more unconventional part of the American tradition in the arts and it is an important expression of the American experience”. -Marguerita Mergentime

This collection included such diverse items as weather vanes, duck decoys, quill drawings and oil lamps which served as inspiration for many of her creations. See below three items Marguerita recast into a modern idiom.