| Willemina Ogterop | |
| Birth Date: | 1881 |
| Death Date: | 1974 |
| Nationality: | Dutch-American |
| Field: | stained glass |
Willemina Ogterop (1881–1974) was a Dutch-American artist and stained glass window designer of almost 500 windows in 80 locations.[1] She was the first woman west of the Mississippi to be inducted into the stained-glass artists’ union. [2]
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 and lived in India and Sri Lanka, historically known as Ceylon, before returning to the Netherlands where their four children were born.[3] The family came to California in 1918 and lived for ten years on a ranch near Santa Cruz. She worked in the Cummings Art Glass Studio in San Francisco as their principal designer from 1928 to 1953,[4] 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[5] 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.[6]