With a Side Garden Turned Shangri-La, This Quietly Elegant Bistro Serves Up Some of Mendocino’s Best Eating

by Holly Madrigal

Miriam C. Rice was a woman with hidden depths and many talents. A researcher, artist, and mother, she was also a boundary-pushing children’s art teacher in Mendocino and an original instructor at the Mendocino Art Center. Miriam’s artistic mediums ranged from sculpture to printmaking and batik. Her curiosity and artistic mind were instrumental in revealing the mysteries of mushroom dyes.

Miriam lived in Mendocino County in the 1960s with her husband, Ray, and their family. The family’s long, rain-soaked walks in the coastal forests revealed an abundance of mushrooms and fungi. The first mushroom she used for dyeing was the sulfur yellow Hypholoma fasciculare, a common woodland mushroom, which she placed in a bubbling pot with wool yarn. The yarn emerged a brilliant lemon yellow. Her curiosity was piqued! Friends in the woods, art studios, and laboratories helped her coax out the hues and shades of the mycorrhizal gifts they found in the forest.

Miriam began identifying different mushroom and fungi species in earnest with the late mycologist Dr. Harry Thiers. She amassed a large collection of dye samples by utilizing the bumper crop of mushrooms resulting from the exceptionally wet winters of the 1970s. These samples formed the foundation of her book, the first and foremost authority on mushroom pigment dyes, Let’s Try Mushrooms for Color, later updated to Mushrooms for Color. The book embodied Miriam’s goal to utilize materials from the natural world in order to move away from chemical dyes. She shared her new discoveries with friends in Sweden, Carla and Erik Sundström, who began their own book, Färga med Svampar, published in 1982.

The technique of mushroom dyeing is quite straightforward. Mashed or chopped, fresh mushrooms of different varieties are added with water in a 1:1 ratio along with the fiber to be dyed. Protein fibers such as wool or angora absorb the dye well, but cotton and linen also work. The mix is simmered for a specific time to imbue the desired color to the fiber. Miriam also did significant research on mordants, a pre-treatment solution to increase the dye’s color fastness. She explored potassium alum sulfate, potassium dichromate, copper sulfate, and more. She also developed a knotting method to signify the use of different mordants, a method that is still widely used today. No knot meant no mordant, one knot equaled alum, and on up to five knots which meant iron sulfate was used. Adhering to her desire to use fewer chemicals in her materials, she determined that alum and iron were the safest mordants.

Fiber artists continued to gather and share knowledge across the seas during mushroom dyeing symposia. Miriam founded the International Mushroom Dye Institute (IMDI) in 1985 to gather students and teachers from all over the world to continue this work. She was an active contributor to the analysis and development of different methods, including evaluating the safety of different mordants and branching out into mushroom paper and mushroom ink sticks.

Miriam passed away in 2010 in her home in Mendocino. I learned all of this as I sat in the light-filled Mendocino studio of Felicia Rice, Miriam and Ray’s daughter. An accomplished artist in her own right, Felicia runs Moving Parts Press, where she creates limited editions of letterpress artists’ books, broadsides, and works of art. She serves on the board of IMDI to ensure that her mother’s work continues.

Felicia has recently been through a literal trial by fire. In 2020, she lost her home of 40 years to a wildfire in the Santa Cruz mountains. The devastation took not only her house, but also her studio and the entire printed 5th edition of her mother’s book. The archive of her works and 200 cases of irreplaceable letterpress type were gone in an instant. Felicia displays a glass jar of feathery grey ash and charcoal—all that remains of her home.

After the fire, Felicia returned to Mendocino, the place where she spent her childhood with her parents. She filled the shed where her father once crafted stop-motion films with newly-acquired equipment. With help and support from friends, colleagues, and organizations, she built the studio that her parents had envisioned back in the 1980s.

Felicia is rebuilding her life, now completing a book called Heavy Lifting, a collection of poems and artwork described as “a fierce work that names the darkness in the belief that the first stage of recovery from grief is acknowledgment and that the precursor to action can be anger.” The book will be released in late 2022.

The recent Mushroom Dyeing workshop, funded by the California Arts Council and hosted by the Pacific Textile Arts at the Larry Spring Museum in Fort Bragg, sold out. It is clear to see that her mother’s passion continues to resonate. “Many don’t realize that my mom was as much of an alchemist as she was an artist,” said Felicia. Always interested in reducing waste, Miriam explored making paper from mushrooms. She found that the polypore shelf fungi made the best paper, because of their naturally occurring chitin and cellulose content. She even invented Myco-stix, which is similar to a pastel crayon of mushroom pigment. “It has been wonderful to reconnect people through my mother’s work,” added Felicia, noting that “IMDI provides a travel grant awarded to textile artists abroad to allow them to attend the mushroom dye symposiums across the world.”

Ensuring her mother’s legacy is a natural extension of this fungal network of arts and history. Felicia is a groundbreaking artist in Mendocino, walking in her parents’ footsteps, supporting the continuation of her mother’s research. Miriam believed in the potential of fungi pigments and saw the establishment of mushroom dyes as a thriving, viable option to imbue color in the world. Through Felicia’s perseverance and the efforts of the IMDI, these vibrant hues will continue to paint the fibers of the textile community.

Learn more about mushroom dyeing on MushroomsForColor.com. Information about Moving Parts Press and the Heavy Lifting release and presentation tour can be found on MovingPartsPress.com.

Photo of Miriam with dye samples by Carla Sundstrom, 1985

All other photos by Holly Madrigal