In Remembrance: Marjorie Nodelman-Niedringhaus ’75MFA Died on January 27 2014

View full image

Marjorie Nodelman-Niedringhaus died on January 27, 2014, at the Kaiser Hospital in Ontario, California. She is survived by her loving husband Robert, her sister and brother-in-law Martha and Bradley Lambertsen, her nieces Katie and Sophia Lambertsen, her nephew Eric Lambertsen, and many, many close and dear friends and teddy bears.

Marjorie was born to Wilson and Florence Frescoln on November 29, 1950, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  She grew up in a Quaker family with roots going back to William Penn.  Her childhood environment was rich in literature, music, and art and she was encouraged at an early age to make things with crayon and paper, thread and cloth, glue and wood, and metronome and piano.  These early experiences gave birth to a passion for the visual arts which she pursued in many forms for the rest of her life.  She earned a bachelor's degree in fine arts from the Philadelphia College of Art in 1973 and went on to obtain a master of fine arts degree from Yale University in 1975.

In 1975, she moved to San Diego and began a professional career in painting and sculpture and for the next 17 years became one of the most prolific and inventive artists in the San Diego and Los Angeles areas.  Marjorie had an irrepressible joy and exuberance for life and art and maintained a very intuitive approach to her paintings and sculpture. From a sweet potato to the military industrial complex, from an art deco button to an orange cement truck, nothing was too small or commonplace to explore or be a source of imagery for her paintings and sculpture. Echoing her childhood fascination with elemental stuff, no medium was too challenging to investigate and use.  She worked with paint and canvas, vinyl and thread, wood and nail guns, and steel and reinforced concrete. In a deep sense, her art was egalitarian and non-hierarchical, which resulted in an openness to the universe and a purity of spirit.

Marjorie’s uniquely circular and shaped canvases became the hallmark of her paintings until they inevitably pushed out from the wall and became painted and even upholstered three dimensional wall sculptures.  Toward the end of her career in San Diego, she moved entirely from the wall and was designing steel and wood sculptures in the round.

In 1992 Marjorie remarried and moved to the Los Angeles area to embark on a second career as a social worker, obtaining a master's in social work from California State University at San Bernardino. For the next 12 years she worked as a clinical social worker for the County of San Bernardino and then as a psychiatric social worker for the State of California.  During this period, she continued to grow as an artist, exploring conceptions of interior space in the design of her home environment, working with paint and walls, earth and plants, colored objects and furniture, always with love and affection.

Marjorie’s ashes will be interred next to her parents in the family’s Quaker ancestral burial ground in Springfield, Pennsylvania.  She never stopped having a sense of wonder and awe with the universe. She will be sorely missed.

A memorial website has been established at mnodelman.com.

—Submitted by the family.