Marianne Appel

Marianne Appel was an American artist and a member of the Woodstock artists colony. She was also known under the professional name of Marianne Harms as a puppet designer. She painted murals for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Fine Arts Section during the Great Depression and was selected for exhibits at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Corcoran Gallery of Art and has works in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She was married to Austin Mecklem from 1936 to his death in 1951, but kept her maiden name professionally until after her second marriage to Carl Harms in 1960, after which she went by Marianne Harms. Harms became an illustrator and puppet designer, learning her craft working with Bil Baird and then working as a designer and fabricator for Jim Henson on the pilot for The Muppets and numerous of his television specials and movies.