Willemina Ogterop

Willemina Ogterop
Born	1881 Maastricht Netherlands
Died	1974
Nationality	Dutch-American
Known for	stained glass

Willemina Ogterop (1881–1974) was a Dutch-American artist and stained glass window designer of almost 500 windows in 80 locations. She was the first woman west of the Mississippi to be inducted into the stained-glass artists’ union.

Biography

Ogterop was born in Maastricht in the Netherlands in 1881. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Amsterdam before going to South Africa at the age of 21. In Africa she met her future husband, and they were married in Java where they lived before returning in 1907 to Netherlands where their four children were born. The family came to California in 1918 and lived for ten years on a farm near Santa Cruz. She worked in the Cummings Art Glass Studio in San Francisco as their principal designer from 1928 to 1953, designing nearly 500 stained glass windows, and creating more than 200 works of art in other media.

There are more than 80 venues, primarily Christian churches, in six states of the US which contain her stained glass works; however, the great majority of her windows are in 40 cities and towns in California, in addition to a total of 9 churches in the states of Nevada, Washington, Oklahoma, Iowa, and Louisiana. She donated three works of art to India, two of which can be found on public display: the woodcarving "Satyagraha" in the National Gandhi Museum in New Delhi and a stained glass plaque depicting a poem in Sanskrit by the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, which is in the Tagore Museum at Visva Bharati University, Santiniketan, Bolpur, West Bengal, India. The third, a plaque, was sent to Nehru in 1946 by way of Nehru's sister, Vajaya Lakshmi Pandit, who received it in New York while on a US national speaking tour for Indian independence, which came about on January 1, 1948.