Margorie Cameron; Pasadena Poet, Assemblage Artist

Margorie Cameron, known professionally as Cameron, 73, controversial poet and artist who helped develop the field of assemblage art. Born in Belle Plain, Iowa, Ms. Cameron served in the Navy during World War II and then moved to Pasadena, where she met and married John Parsons, a rocket scientist who helped found Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He introduced her to occult studies and to a group of jazz aficionados who were also involved in assemblage art and experimental film. Among the group was artist Wallace Berman, who published Ms. Cameron’s work in his magazine, Semina, and included it in an exhibit at the Ferus Gallery in 1957. It was Cameron’s erotic drawing of a copulating couple (which she said she drew while under the influence of peyote) that caused the Los Angeles Police Department vice squad to close down the Ferus exhibit. The drawing was included in a retrospective of Ms. Cameron’s work exhibited at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery in Barnsdall Park in 1989. Also exhibited was her series of ghostly drawings done in the early 1980s titled “Pluto Transiting the Twelfth House.” Ms. Cameron participated in underground films, acting with Anais Nin in “Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome” and making her own life and work the subject of “Wormwood Star.” On July 24 in Pasadena of cancer.