Cooper Hewitt says...
Harwood Steiger (American 1900 – 1980) and his wife Sophie (American, ? – 1980) ran the Tubac Steiger Studio in Tubac Arizona, producing screen-printed fabrics which became synonymous with the Southwestern style in the post-World War II era.
While studying art at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Harwood Steiger took his first job as a colorist in a textile dye factory, which inspired and informed his future interest in textile printing. He went on to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and in the 1920s he moved to New York, where he opened a studio and began teaching classes. In the 1930s, he started a summer art school on Martha’s Vineyard called the Steiger Paint Group. His work from this period, primarily paintings of ordinary people, was associated with the Regionalist art movement. There he met and married his wife, Sophie, a schoolteacher and painter with a particular interest in botanical drawings.
After travelling through the southwest, the couple fell in love with Arizona, and in 1956 they built a home and studio in Tubac, a small village forty-five miles southwest of Tucson. They also became interested in the art of silkscreen printing. The two worked together closely on the screen printing business, Harwood creating the original drawings, and the two working together to transfer them to screens and produce the small-run yardages. They were primarily interested in the landscape, flora and fauna of the Sonoran Desert. From the 1950s through the 1970s, they created hundreds of patterns in the form of tabletop textiles, yardage, and dress panels.
