User:Lulu oblomova/Sandbox

Masha Archer is an American jewelry designer. Born in Kiev in 1940 to a sculptor father and painter mother, she fled the Soviet Union with her family in 1942 and lived in an American DP camp in Gottingen until 1949, when they emigrated to Philadelphia. Archer studied graphic design at Pratt Institute in New York, but left early to take a job as a restorer and exhibitor at the Museo Nacional de Mexico, hoping to eventually attend the art school there. She never matriculated, but met her future husband, art photographer Charles Homer Archer (1929-1993) and lived with him in the Yucatan jungle where they had their first child, Maya. Living in Tuscon and San Francisco in the 1960’s, Masha redirected her arts training into clothing design, and became known for harmoniously mixing patterns and bright colors. In the seventies she studied belly dancing with American teacher Jamila Salimpour, and founded the San Francisco Classical Dance Troupe, developing and popularizing what came to be known as the American Tribal style. One of her students, Carolina Nerriccio, went on to direct the successful Fat Chance Belly Dance troupe and school, also based in San Francisco. In the early eighties, Masha began her Art-to-Wear jewelry line. Combining her artist’s sense of color and an architect’s attentiveness to structure and function, she utilizes such materials as turquoise, coral, antique ivory, malachite, copal, jade, pearl, and petrified wood. Her husband, an alumnus of the fabled Black Mountain College in North Carolina, documented all her work in clothing, jewelry, and dance in a vast legacy of art photography until his death from cancer in 1993. Masha Archer is regarded as one of the premier fashion jewelry designers in the world. Her work is sold primarily in Saks Fifth Avenue stores in the US.