(Roughly) Daily

Starting in 1974, the Michigan-based company Marüshka produced ready-to-hang wall art in a bold, simple graphic style that evoked Japanese woodblock prints, Pop Art, and Mid-Century Modern textiles by Alexander Girard, who designed for Herman Miller, and the Helsinki firm Marimekko. At Marüshka, linen or cotton canvas would be silkscreened by hand, stretched, and fitted to a wood frame, and then sold for $24 apiece. Company founder Richard Sweet, who passed away in 2007, had a rather sweet notion to democratize art and make it affordable to the public…  if you lived in the United States in the 1970s or ’80s, chances are its imagery is emblazoned in your brain. You may have blankly stared at a Marüshka silkscreen-on-canvas print while waiting at a doctor’s office, in a hospital, or at a corporate headquarters…

Now, as Collectors Weekly reports, Marüshka is coming again into vogue…

… Marüshka prints are popping up in hip Apartment Therapy tours, and obsessive young collectors have emerged, some even forming blogs and Flickr groups to document every Marüshka they unearth from thrift stores and at garage sales…

Read the whole story– and see more Marüshkas– at “The Vintage Waiting Room Art That’s Hooked the Shabby Chic Crowd.”

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As we hang’em high, we might send cultivated birthday greetings to Mikimoto Kōkichi; he was born on this date in 1858.  The first son of an udon shop owner in Toba, Mikimoto left school at the age of 13 to sell vegetables to support his family.  But watching the pearl divers of Ise unload their hauls at the shore ignited a fascination with pearls.  In 1888, Mikimoto started his first– reputedly the first– oyster farm, and began  developing the technique of inserting an irritant (often a piece of oyster epithelial membrane) into the oyster to cause the formation of a pearl. Within 12 years Mikimoto’s oysters were producing completely spherical pearls that were indistinguishable from the highest quality natural ones, though commercial scale was still years away.  Still, he is credited with creating the first cultured pearl, and later, with starting the pearl industry via the establishment of his luxury pearl company, Mikimoto.

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