An artist central to the revival of Paraguayan modern art, Olga Blinder was deeply committed to arts education. She challenged the academicism that dominated mid-century Paraguayan art, emphasising both form and content while directing art institutions that prioritised pedagogy. In 1943, O. Blinder received a degree in engineering from the Universidad Nacional de Asunción (UNA), where she also completed a degree in education in 1965. Interactions with Paraguayan and Brazilian artists impacted her artistic training in the late 1940s and early 1950s: she studied painting with Ofelia Echagüe (1904–1987) at the Ateneo Paraguayo and worked with João Rossi (1923–2000) while Lívio Abramo (1903–1992) taught her woodcutting. Subsequently, her paintings and prints adopted an expressive nature, addressing the human condition, particularly of women and children. She held her first solo show at the Centro Cultural Paraguayo in Asunción in 1952. The following year, she presented the paintings A viela [The Alley, 1952] and Rosas [Roses, 1952] at the second São Paulo Biennial.

Along with Josefina Plá (1903–1999), Lilí del Mónico (1910–2002) and José Laterza Parodi (1915–1981), O. Blinder co-founded the Grupo Arte Nuevo in 1954. In the same year, the group organised the Primera Semana de Arte Moderno Paraguayo [First Week of Modern Paraguayan Art], an event that echoed the ground-breaking 1922 Brazilian Modern Art Week. However, the group struggled to find a host institution. This was due to both the limited number of exhibition spaces in Asunción and the radical nature of the group’s proposal, which focused on expressionism, humanity and society. As a solution, the Grupo Arte Nuevo displayed their work in shop windows across six blocks of Palma Street in central Asunción.

Throughout her career, O. Blinder believed that art should form part of everyone’s life — an approach that led her to establish many art education centres. In 1959, with the Brazilian educator Augusto Rodríguez (1913–1993), she founded the Escolinha de Arte de Asunción (EAA), part of the Misión Cultural Brasileña. She directed the school until 1976, when the Brazilian government fired her due to known objections to its military dictatorship (1964–1985). In her home country, she was also critical of the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner (1954–1989), a view she expressed through woodcuts such as Espía [Spy, 1975] or the series Los torturados [The tortured ones, ca. 1970]. In a work from the latter series, O. Blinder makes visible the dehumanisation that the regime inflicted on citizens. She depicts rigid, upright bodies stacked together, restricted by the black space that encases them. The traces of the wood grooves from the printing block echo bodily incisions. In this sense, technique and content work in tandem to convey the brutality of the dictatorship.

Despite her forced departure from the EAA, she was central in inaugurating art institutions that still resonate today. For example, in 1972 she co-founded the Colección Circulante de Arte Contemporáneo, now part of the Centro de Artes Visuales/Museo del Barro. In 1995, she initiated the Instituto Superior de Arte, now the Doctor Olga Blinder Department of Architecture, Design, and Art at the UNA. Additionally, she founded the Taller de Expresión Infantil (1976), amongst numerous other institutions.