Margret Craver

Born in Kansas City, Missouri, Margret Craver graduated in 1929 from the University of Kansas, where she developed a lifelong interest in hollowware and jewelry design. Her metalsmithing class did not offer instruction in techniques, nor were tutorial programs available elsewhere in the country, so Craver went to Europe. She studied with Baron Erik Fleming in Sweden and became a catalyst for promoting metalsmithing in America after World War II.

Motivated by the lack of rehabilitative therapy for wounded soliders while serving as a hospital volunteer, and through her association with the New York City metal refinery of Handy and Harman, Craver trained occupational therapists in metalsmithing. She also convened workshop conferences to teach the process to art teachers so that adequate instruction could be obtained in America. Craver rediscovered en résille, a difficult French seventeenth-century enameling technique, in which the metal is suspended within the enamel rather than serving as a backing for it.

Kenneth R. Trapp and Howard Risatti Skilled Work: American Craft in the Renwick Gallery (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art with the Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998)