In 1908, after her father won 80 acres of homestead land in a lottery, the Wismer family moved to Spokane, Washington, and opened a lunchroom.

The following year she collaborated with Seattle artist Grace Perry to publish Twelve Block Prints of Lake Chelan.

[1] She returned to Tokyo in 1946 and went to work for the Civil Information and Education (CI&E) Division of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) during the occupation of Japan, designing brochures and posters to promote the reconstruction project.

She continued to make her own screen prints and abstract paintings, and made her first solo exhibition at the International House of Japan in 1960.

[4] In the Japan Times, Donald Richie wrote in 2008, "Blakemore's style was modernist in that it derived from Cezanne...and the mild cubism seen in another influence, Diego Rivera.

This was much molded, however, by what she had seen and studied in Japan, and the Mingei (folk crafts) theories of her friends Soetsu Yanagi and Shoji Hamada.

In 1990, they co-founded the Blakemore Foundation, which grants scholarships for the study of East and Southeast Asian languages to American citizens and permanent residents.