Carley Craig was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1906 and died in Atlanta, Georgia in 1992. Her creative life was divided into five phases -- Hollywood costume design, dress design and manufacturing, custom dress design, painting, and sculpture.
Hollywood Costume Design -- Carley began her career as a free-lance sketch artist, eventually developing into a fashion designer in Hollywood for Paramount, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Warner Brothers, Universal, and First National Studios. She worked particularly closely with both Edith Head and Irene Sharif. She was also very active in developing her own cartoon lines, which were oriented around current fashion themes. As was common at the time, she worked under a stage name (Tedi Berri), a combination of her birth name of Henrietta and the last name of her first husband, Hal Berry. This period of her career covered 25 years from 1920 to 1945.
Dress Design and Manufacturing -- At the end of WWII, Carley designed a line of childrens' wear, and using these designs she and her second husband, Jim Craig, started up and ran a dress manufacturing operation called Kim's of California from 1945 to 1948. The concept revolved around an idea for manufacturing small girls' dresses in a way that would reduce ironing time (this was before the era of synthetic materials). The dresses were designed so they could be laid flat on an ironing board by using drawstrings in the neck, sleeves, and waist which could be loosened before ironing and tightened again after the dress was put on. The idea also lent itself well to accommodating the same dress size to different childrens' sizes. Unfortunately, an inability to procure the necessary materials for dress manufacture in the difficult post-war supply conditions led to the demise of Kim's of California in 1948.
Custom Dress Design -- During the years 1949-1950 Carley ran a small custom dress shop in Santa Fe, New Mexico called Southwest Derivatives. Her clientele consisted largely of local socialites who were active in the Santa Fe square-dancing community and who were looking for dresses with a Hollywood flare. The business was quite successful, although the family reluctantly left Santa Fe after only two years because of a lack of long-term professional opportunities for her engineer husband, Jim Craig.
Painting -- After the family followed the Lockheed Corporation's move to Georgia in 1950, Carley focused on a career in painting which lasted for 18 years. She used a number of different media in her work and was very active and well-known in the local Atlanta art community, both as a painter and as a teacher. She exhibited throughout the Southeast, as well as having her own one-man show in New York City in 1967. In order to establish herself as a serious artist independently of her Hollywood career, she changed her professional name from Tedi Berri to Carley Craig. This period of her career covered 18 years from 1950 to 1967.
Sculpture -- After the 1967 death of her husband, who had supported her enthusiastically throughout her career, Carley felt that a change was in order and returned to school in 1968 to transition to a career in sculpture, which she continued for 25 years until her death in 1992. Two pieces of hers are included in the Atlanta High Museum of Art's collection of works by Georgia artists.
Biographies
Short Biography (by artist)
Medium Biography (by artist)
Long Biography (by artist)
Hollywood Costume/Cartoon Design (1920-1945)
Costume 1
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Cartoon 1
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L.A. Herald 05/29/1924
S.F. Call 12/16/1924
S.F. Chronicle 06/22/1924
Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 03/25/1925
L. A. Times, 01/xx/1925
L. A. Evening Herald, 06/18/1928
Dress Manufacturing (1945-1948)
Brochure for Kim's of California
Custom Dress Design (1949-1950)
Painting (1950-1967)
Watercolor 1
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Mixed Media 1
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Sculpture (1968-1992)
Sculpture 1
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02/01/1970 -- Artifacts Magazine Cover
09/08/1971 -- 'Steel Life' Moves Outdoors
12/09/1973 -- What Will Carley Craig Do Next?
01/11/1976 -- Hollywood Designer Turns to Career in Fine Arts
05/30/1979 -- Artists to Open their Homes for Art Council Tour
03/02/1980 -- Creative Arts Guild in Dalton, GA
03/05/1980 -- Northsider Clipping
11/03/1988 -- Lines of Stretched Energy
10/01/1990 -- Robb Report
Vocabulary 1
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