Marguerite Blasingame (1906–1947)

Marguerite Louis Blasingame (1906 - 1947) was an American sculptor and painter who was born Marguerite Louis in Honolulu. She graduated from the University of Hawai’i and then went on to earn an M.A. in art from Stanford University in 1928. Marguerite returned to Hawaii, where she became an established sculptor of figural works, many of them bas-reliefs in wood and stone. Her depictions were usually sinuous in contour with simplified anatomy. During the Great Depression, she was a WPA artist and filled many commissions for architectural panels.

 In 1934 Blasingame founded the Hawaiian Mural Arts Guild in 1934, along with Isami Doi, Madge Tennent, and others. She authored A Course in Art Appreciation for the Adult Layman, which was published by Stanford University Press. One of her wooden sculptures is installed in the Holt Gallery of the Honolulu Museum of Art. Other sculptures in public places includes an untitled 1935 marble sculpture in Ala Moana Park in Honolulu.

Marguerite Louis Blasingame died in 1947 while traveling in Mexico. On Saturday 15 March 1947, fellow island artist Madge Tennent published the following tribute to Blasingame in the Honolulu Advertiser:

To her many artist friends she represented a youthful and indomitable vitality in art, which was supported by a capacity for grueling hard work in her chosen field of true fresco and sculptured bas-relief in Hawaiian wood and stone. She was, by almost any way of thinking, too young to die. But the strangely wonderful thing is this, that she has in her sadly short young life, left more important works of art which have been placed where everybody may enjoy them, than any other island artist.