© 2024 Public Radio Tulsa
800 South Tucker Drive
Tulsa, OK 74104
(918) 631-2577

A listener-supported service of The University of Tulsa
classical 88.7 | public radio 89.5
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Now at the Price Tower: "Greta Magnusson Grossman: A Car and Some Shorts"

By Rich Fisher

http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/kwgs/local-kwgs-1001402.mp3

Tulsa, OK – On today's edition of ST, we speak with Scott Perkins, Curator of Collections and Exhibitions at the Price Tower Arts Center in Bartlesville, who tells us about an interesting new show on view at that museum through May 6th. It's "Greta Magnusson Grossman: A Car and Some Shorts," and it offers a detailed look at the work of one of the 20th century's most prolific women designers. Indeed, this traveling exhibition, developed by the Swedish Museum of Architecture, is the first-ever attempt to chronicle the influential career of the Swedish-American modernist architect and designer in a museum setting. And as Perkins explains on today's program, Greta Magnusson Grossman (1906-99) has been receiving renewed attention and appreciation of late --- and no wonder. She's widely seen as the matriarch of design in Sweden, and (over the course of a 40-year career) she was the first woman to graduate from the Stockholm School of Industrial Design, the first woman to be awarded by the Swedish Craft Association for furniture design, and the first woman to own and operate a furniture studio. And in the 1940s and beyond, after fleeing the Nazis and relocating to California, she created her most iconic products, among them the Grasshopper floor lamp and the Cobra floor and table lamps. (Her Grasshopper lamp, with its tripod stand and an aluminum bullet-shaped hood mounted on a flexible arm, became widely imitated in its heyday. And her Cobra lamp won the Good Design Award in 1950 and was shown at the Good Design Show at MoMA.) For more about this exhibit, you can contact the Price Tower Arts Center at 918.336.4949 or pricetower.org. Also on today's StudioTulsa, Ian Shoales, our cantankerous commentator on popular culture, has a few thoughts of his own about Swedish design, art, food, culture, literature, history, and what-not.