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In 1952, following a year living in Mexico, Mary Fuller McChesney (1922 – 2022) and her husband, Abstract Expressionist painter, Robert McChesney (1913–2008), hand-built a small home and two studios on two acres atop Sonoma Mountain near Petaluma, California. Their plot was the first in a planned artist’s colony that never materialized because of the remote location. Mary sculpted, wrote for art magazines, and in the mid-1960s, she worked for the Archives of American Art on an oral history project to document San Francisco artists who participated in the Works Progress Administration’s 1935–43 Federal Art Project. She also interviewed postwar Abstract Expressionist artists from the Bay Area, which evolved into her book A Period of Exploration: San Francisco 1945–1950 and the accompanying exhibition at the Oakland Museum in 1973. That decade, Mary Fuller McChesney began work on larger, publicly commissioned sculptures, carving forms from a mixture of cement, sand, vermiculite, and water as they slowly dried. We are saddened to hear that one of the artists featured in our exhibition “California Modernist Women: Groundbreaking Creativity,” the sculptor and art historian Mary Fuller McChesney, passed away recently at 99 years old. Read more about Mary Fuller McChesney’s amazing life in her New York Times obituary: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/28/arts/mary-fuller-mcchesney-dead.html See “California Modernist Women: Groundbreaking Creativity” on display, post-security, in Harvey Milk Terminal 1 and online at: https://bit.ly/CaliforniaModernistWomen
This image was posted on July 08, 2022.
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