drapery

Ronald Allen Kaye was born May 7, 1941, in Chicago to Rose Lasky and Al Kaye, a homemaker and a drapery salesman, who had emigrated from Russia and entered the country as Abraham Krakovsky, according to the family.

Both shows are deeply personal for the "Semi-Homemade" icon, a woman who spent her childhood stretching pennies and much of her 20s traveling to state fairs and home shows as she built her first business, a drapery kits venture she called Kurtain Kraft.

After dropping out of the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, she moved to Malibu and started a company called Kurtain Kraft, which created a product that used wire hangers and fabric to create window drapery.

Revealing labels are sometimes nicely tucked away, as in one on the far side of “The Age of Maturity” informing that the baroque flourish of drapery billowing at the apex is actually a precise facsimile, the original bronze piece currently undergoing conservation back in Paris.

In one Center City apartment Gray’s company worked on, drapery panels took the focus away from unattractive radiators.