Marge Dodge

Marge Dodge (1918-2003) born Marguerite Gilbertson in 1918 in Stoughton, Wisconsin, Marge won a scholarship after high school to attend Layton School of Art in Milwaukee. Now defunct, the school was then considered one of the top five art schools in the country. There she formed a four-artist partnership called the “Easelists” that traveled around the Midwest doing portraits. After marrying Rodney Dodge in 1942, she moved with him to the Deep South, studying art at the Atlanta Art Institute and raising two children in Savannah. In 1955, she brought her talent to Missoula where she resumed her academic career at the University of Montana, completing a BFA, a BA and MA in Art. For her thesis, she experimented with encaustic painting, a complex and technical process of painting with hot wax. She collaborated with Rudy Autio and Peter Voulkos to create fine art ceramic sculptures.  

Marge’s art shifted seismically as her personal life slipped out of her control.  In the 1950s, her husband Rodney was at the top of his field, the world’s leading authority in the field of entomology, as the years went by, he suffered from increasingly frequent mental health episodes. A late diagnosis of schizophrenia provided answers but no solutions. This turmoil in Marge’s personal life can be seen in the work she produced during her husband’s schizophrenic episodes. Marge was still creating art through all       the challenges of her husband’s worsening schizophrenia; Marge turned to unorthodox colors and imaginary subjects to convey her emotions on the canvas. This was her language and coping skills until Rodney took his own life in 1973.