Margaret Peterson (artist) employer University of California, Berkeley
Biography
Peterson was born in Seattle, Washington. In the 1920s she studied at the University of California, Berkeley, graduating in 1926 with a Bachelor in Arts and soon joined its faculty of Fine Arts in 1928. The years between 1928 and 1950 were productive years for Peterson; this included a funded trip to Europe (1931), several exhibitions, marriage to her husband, the Canadian writer Howard O'Hagan (1937), and a year spent at Green Point, Cowichan Bay, British Columbia to study Indigenous Art in Victoria’s former anthropological museum (1947-1948). In 1950, at the height of McCarthyism, she rejected an oath of loyalty imposed by the University of California, Berkeley’s board of regents and left her faculty position for New York, where she would have a solo exhibition at the former Algonquin Hotel.Throughout the 1950s, she would continue to exhibit and travel. In 1951, she went to both Mexico and Guatemala and saw the arts of the Toltecs, Zapotecs, Aztecs, and Mayan cultures and also returned to Cowichan Bay. In 1952 she returned to San Francisco and founded a painting school. By 1956 she had moved to Victoria, BC. During the 1960s she would go on to learn mosaic techniques in Europe (1963), pursue a new interest in Romanesque and Medieval painting (1964), and have a mosaic of hers, Source of Sources (1964), installed in the McPherson Library at the University of Victoria. In the 1970s, she returned to Victoria (1974), created a mosaic for the Richard Blanshard building (1976-1977), and had a retrospective exhibition at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (1978). Her husband died in 1982 and Peterson died on May 15, 1997.
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