Margaret Hermann
Margaret Hermann was born October 12, 1951 in Los Alamos, New Mexico, and lived in Colorado, Oklahoma, and New Mexico, before attending Rice University (Houston, Texas) where she majored in Fine Arts and History of Art, doing all her studio courses in Photography. After traveling in Europe in the mid-seventies, she returned to New Mexico and was influenced by Laura Gilpin and studied photography with Meridel Rubenstein in Santa Fe. Margaret became interested in weaving while working as a fire lookout in Arizona where she taught herself Navajo weaving from a book and proceeded to weave many saddle blankets in the lookout tower to occupy the long hours on fire watch. Travel to Peru and Bolivia further inspired her interest in weaving, spinning and dyeing. She moved to Northern New Mexico in the late seventies and designed and built a small solar adobe house west of Chama where she continued to weave on a Navajo Loom which was fixed to the cedar posts that held up her house. She worked a horseback Wilderness Patrol for the US Forest Service in Pagosa Springs, Colorado until the birth of her daughter in 1987. In 1989 she moved to Taos to learn weaving from Rachel Brown and in 1990 became Rachel's apprentice. She now lives in Taos and still weaves saddle blankets, but also spins and weaves rugs and tapestries. Her inspiration comes from her wilderness travels and visits to other faraway places, including Australia, and most recently, Nepal. |