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34 ORNAMENT 35.5.2012 Margaret De Patta " Pioneer of Modern Studio Jewelry Contemporary jewelry," De Patta believed, "must characterize our times with its emphasis on space and structure, strong light, open forms, cantilever, floating structures and movements." MARGARET DE PATTA in her San Francisco studio. The Margaret De Patta archives, Bielawski Trust, Port Richmond, California, 1948. Photograph by George Strauss. Jo Lauria M argaret De Patta was one of the first American artists to recognize the possibilities for modern design in jewelry. From the mid-1930s until her death in 1964, the role she played as innovator, educator, co-founder of the Metal Arts Guild of San Francisco, and overall social activist/ art advocate helped define and guide the burgeoning American modernist jewelry movement regionally and nationally. De Patta's greatest contribution to the field of metal arts was to approach jewelry as sculpture, to treat each piece as a complex composition scaled to wearable size. The means by which she accomplished this was to apply modern art principles of abstraction and constructivism to her jewelry design, along with applying some basic tenets of architecture such as asymmetry and cantilevered form. This precipitated a move away from traditional shapes, materials and techniques in jewelry design and propelled a great leap into the unknown—a "movement forward" as longtime friend and accomplished jeweler Merry Renk explained: "Only Margaret dared to do the things she did. She was absolutely courageous. She had a need to work in a place that was unknown." The legacy of De Patta can be assessed by viewing the exhibition currently on display at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York City, June 12 through September 23, 2012. Titled Space-Light-Structure, The Jewelry of Margaret De Patta, the exhibition is co-organized by the Oakland Museum of California (where it was on view February 3 through May 13, 2012) in partnership with the Museum of Arts and Design. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog with lead essays extensively researched by exhibition curators Ursula Ilse- Neuman and Julie M. Muñiz, and contributing essay by design historian Glenn Adamson. Here is what I learned from making my own assessment, after visiting the exhibition at the Oakland Museum of California; reading the exhibition catalog; interviewing Merry Renk and Imogene "Tex" Gieling (two Bay Area metalsmiths who knew Margaret De Patta) for their insights about De Patta and her work. Pioneer of Modern Studio Jewelry is a title that should be given to Margaret De Patta as she advanced the aesthetics of jewelry and helped to position the metal arts field at mid-century to be on par with the other studio arts of ceramics, glass, fiber, wood, and furniture. "Margaret De Patta was among the artists who carried the torch of Modernism in the early 1940s," remarked Imogene Gieling, a Bay Area colleague and metalsmith of national acclaim. "Alexander Calder, Claire Falkenstein, Harry Bertoia, and De Patta. She was part of this group of cutting-edge artists who worked with jewelry on an abstract level." Some of the strategies De Patta used that helped forge this new direction and growth in the field were the deployment of modern design rationales based on art/design theories that resulted in complex jewelry constructions often rooted in constructivist principles. Typical would be compositions that