“Basically, I’m a tourist, moving around the world to faraway places… Then it all pops out in my work—someone else’s culture and mine.” Katherine Westphal

Katherine Westphal was one of California’s best known and prolific textile artists of the late 20th century. Her work is represented in the permanent collections of leading museums, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

From childhood in Los Angeles, where she often roller-skated to school from her home on Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street, Katherine was high spirited, with a strong will to express herself, longing to expand her world and to explore new places and worlds. From a very early age she drew, structured collages, and remade doll’s clothing. She could see the creative potential in the most mundane materials, transforming them into her own personal artistic creations, an impulse she elevated to high levels of accomplishment in later years. Her innovations brought traditionally female crafts, such as appliqué, stitching, tapestry, and quilting, to the level of contemporary art.

Westphal received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in painting at the University of California, Berkeley. She taught art at the University of Wyoming in Laramie for a year prior to joining the Art Department at the University of Washington in Seattle, where she met her husband, Ed Rossbach. They moved to Berkeley in 1950, when Ed was offered a position at UC Berkeley.

For many years she worked as an independent artist, producing one-of-a-kind works, wearable art, and commercial textiles, all of which carried innovative, whimsical, and lighthearted qualities. She designed by manipulating images on the photocopy machine and then transferring them to cloth, combining and layering to create an integrated image.

In 1966, after taking a teaching position at UC Davis, she developed a lecture class, “World Textiles,” in which introduced her students to indigenous design. Her lectures became famous for their relevance to the growing interest in non-Western arts. They were also informed by the extensive traveling she and Ed did during their sabbaticals, which were immortalized in series of quilts and wall hangings.

Prolific and tireless, seeing the potential in almost any material and letting her imagination take her wherever it led, she inspired the next generation of textile artists. Katherine Westphal passed away in Berkeley at age 99.