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Wednesday Woman: Peggy Tolk-Watkins
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Sep 17

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Wednesday Woman: Peggy Tolk-Watkins • Peggy Tolk-Watkins was an American painter and poet whose work bridged the Bay Area’s artistic and musical worlds. Born and raised in New York City, she worked with underprivileged children as an arts and crafts supervisor in Lower East Side settlement houses. She studied literature at Black Mountain College. After graduating, she moved to San Francisco, where she became a central force in the city’s postwar nightlife. • In 1950 Tolk-Watkins founded The Tin Angel, a legendary jazz and folk club that nurtured performers including Odetta, Kid Ory, and Turk Murphy. Later, with Sally Stanford, she opened The Fallen Angel, another renowned venue that cemented her role in shaping San Francisco’s cultural scene. SF columnist Ralph J. Gleason wrote that Peggy had the knack of “getting interesting people to come to the club regardless of the entertainment of the moment. She was stimulating to talk to herself and that drew interesting people.” • Alongside her club work, Tolk-Watkins was a self-taught artist. She pursued painting and exhibited at the de Young Museum in 1960. Her “primitive” style, marked by bold colors and imaginative depictions of animals and flowers, reflected both playfulness and depth. Her painting “The Red Reindeer” is dedicated to Ruth Asawa, Tolk-Watkins’ peer at Black Mountain College, and is held in the collection of the Sausalito Historical Society. Asawa collected Tolk-Watkins’ work and displayed it in her home. Several works will be on view this autumn as a part of Asawa’s retrospective at MoMA in New York, opening October 19th.

Wednesday Woman: Jadwiga Grabowska-Hawrylak
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Aug 20

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Wednesday Woman: Jadwiga Grabowska-Hawrylak • Jadwiga Grabowska-Hawrylak was one of the most important Polish architects of her generation. Her career helped shape the postwar identity of Wrocław in the 1950s. One of the first women to graduate from the Faculty of Architecture at Wrocław University of Technology, she became a central figure in the city’s reconstruction after World War II. • Grabowska-Hawrylak’s early projects included housing developments designed to address urgent shortages, but she is best known for her bold modernist and later brutalist buildings. Her most iconic work, the sculptural Manhattan housing complex on Plac Grunwaldzki, constructed between 1963 and 1969, remains a landmark of Polish modernism. Combining innovative prefabrication techniques with expressive concrete forms, the project embodied both modernist ideals and the constraints of socialist-era architecture. • Over the course of her career, Grabowska-Hawrylak’s designs, which ranged from schools and churches to residential blocks and public buildings, balanced aesthetics with post war priorities of civic responsibility. Her architectural practice was inseparable from rebuilding society and shaping collective life.

Wednesday Woman: Lilly Reich
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Aug 6

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Wednesday Woman: Lilly Reich • Lilly Reich was a German modernist designer and architect. Born in 1885, she began her career at Josef Hoffmann’s Wiener Werkstätte in Vienna, where she worked in textiles and interior design. She returned to Berlin in 1911 to open her own studio in interior design, decorative art, and fashion. • Reich joined the influential Deutscher Werkbund in 1912 and became its first woman board member in 1920. From 1925 to 1938 she collaborated closely with architect Mies van der Rohe. As romantic and professional partners, they worked on curatorial projects and designed modernist furniture. • Invested in the new industrial production techniques and materials of the time, Reich is credited as the only woman to design a complete furniture series made from tubular steel. In a story all-too-familiar for women designers, the iconic steel and leather Barcelona Chair was long attributed solely to van der Rohe, while Reich’s contribution was neglected. And yet, new historic evidence suggests that Reich not only co-designed the chair but was the primary designer of the entire Barcelona Pavilion for the 1929 World Exhibition in Barcelona. • In 1932, Reich became one of the first women teachers at the Bauhaus and directed the interior design workshop and weaving studio. Her tenure was cut short when the school was closed in 1933 by the Nazis. A dedicated steward of records during WWII, she preserved thousands of design drawings. After the war, she taught at the Berlin University of Arts until illness forced her to resign. Although she died in 1947, recognition of her contributions emerged much later, when MoMA devoted a retrospective to her work in 1996.
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