Marguerite Redman Dorgeloh Biography

Marguerite Redman Dorgeloh

American

1890-1944

Biography

 

Marguerite Redman Dorgeloh (née Marguerite Redman), printmaker and painter, was born in Watsonville, California on December 14, 1890. Her father, Christy Gentry Redman, was a farmer. Marguerite studied at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco and the San Jose Teachers College. She married John Dorgeloh, a prominent San Francisco lawyer and official at the Bank of America, and spent most of her career in San Francisco. Their son Justin was born in 1913 and, in 1918, she is listed as a decorator in San Francisco. After her divorce from John Dorgeloh, Marguerite married Albert E. Byron, MD. Her work is sometimes signed Redman Byron, Dorgeloh, or Redman Dorgeloh. She personally preferred being called “Redman.”

During the Depression, Dorgeloh assisted on the WPA mural project in San Francisco’s Coit Tower. She also worked in the graphic art department of the WPA and produced a large number of lithographs for the San Francisco Fine Arts Project (FAP). Her images included many San Francisco landmarks and the Golden Gate Park area. Her lithograph Van Ness Mansion appeared on the front page of the San Francisco News on 6 November 1941. Dorgeloh also worked in etching, oil, and watercolor.

During the second season of the Golden Gate International Exposition which opened on May 25, 1940, the Exposition’s Fine Arts Palace was transformed into an active arts section in which artists worked and demonstrated art making. The program was called Art in Action and Dorgeloh demonstrated lithography using stones. After the Depression, she worked in the 1940s as an artist for a shipyard company.

Dorgeloh exhibited at the Paul Elder Gallery in San Francisco in 1929, the San Francisco Women Artists in 1931, the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco in 1939/1940, and the San Francisco Arts Association in 1939. Her work is represented in the collections of the University Museums, Iowa State University, Ames; the Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia, Athens; the Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland; the Jordon Schnitzer Museum of Art, University of Oregon, Eugene; the Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis; the Monterey Museum of Art, California; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania; the Jundt Art Museum, Gonzaga University, Spokane, Washington; the University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson; and the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

Marguerite Redman Dorgeloh died in Pasadena, California on March 18, 1944.