Maja Sjöström (1868-1961) was a Swedish textile artist whose working life ran from the 1890s to the 1930s. Born in rural Skåne, she was admitted to the new pattern-drafting course at the Technical School in Stockholm in 1889, and from 1893 spent twenty-four years at Handarbetets Vänner, where she became the studio's leading artist and helped make it the foremost textile workshop in the Nordic countries.
Between 1916 and 1923 she was responsible for the entire textile decoration of Stockholm City Hall, working to the architect Ragnar Östberg - the largest textile commission of its day, and one that included monumental silk hangings woven at the Luigi Bevilacqua mill in Venice. She moved to Rome after the building opened and remained in Italy for the rest of her life.
Maja Sjöström in her atelier on Hantverkargatan, 1922. Stockholms stadshus, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
