Marge Dodge Bio

Marge Dodge’s mission was always to make art accessible to everyone and the promotion of visual arts. She was a prolific artist in Wisconsin, Georgia, and Montana. She worked and excelled in more than a dozen different mediums including oil, watercolor, encaustic, wood block prints, ink/pencil, pastels, sculpture, paper design, and multimedia.

Marge won several awards for her work and her work on historically significant places was acquired by the DeKalb County Library Art Gallery in Greater Atlanta. Several of her illustrations can be found in Missoula Valley History edited by Jo Rainbolt.

Born Marguerite Gilbertson in Stoughton, Wisconsin, Marge won a scholarship after high school to attend Layton School of Art in Milwaukee. 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 where studying art at the Atlanta Art Institute and then 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 requirements for a BFA, BA and MA in Art. 

In Missoula she was very involved in the art community. She received her professional Class I Teaching Certificate and held a supervisory position for District One Schools. She also launched and taught an art program for the Senior Citizens Center. Her art classes under the Adult Education program were incredibly popular. She held private classes for children and adults, and taught at the former Missoula County High School.

Marge was an active member of the Montana Institute of the Arts. She formed a fine arts group that encouraged and supported local artists. Her paintings have been selected to travel throughout the State as selections from the annual Festivals of the Arts sponsored by the Montana Institute of the Arts. She had one-person invitational shows in Atlanta, the Hockaday Art Center in Kalispell, and Reeder’s Alley in Helena. Her paintings are in private and public collections in the Middle East and the United States. A watercolor painting was presented to the Mental Health Clinic at Fort Missoula by Dr. Gladys Holmes.

She is represented here with an illustration of a watercolor in Women Artists in America II.