Mary Fuller McChesney (October 20, 1922 – May 4, 2022) was an American sculptor and art historian. She was a 1975 National Endowment for the Arts fellow.[1]
She started a ceramics business of her own, along with her partner Avrum "Bill" Rubenstein: "Two Fish Pottery". She held her first solo art show, of paintings and clay sculptures, Artists’ Guild Gallery (an artists’ co-op) in San Francisco.[3] Through her association with The Artists' Guild Gallery, she became acquainted with a wide variety of her contemporary artists, including Hassel Smith, Ed Corbett, Emmy Lou Packard, Robert P. McChesney, George Goya, John Hultbert, Clyfford Still, and Ad Reinhardt.[3]
She married Robert McChesney in December 1949;[4] they lived in the North Bay area.[5] They moved to Sonoma Mountain in Sonoma County near Petaluma, California in 1952, after living in Mexico for a year, and lived and worked there through Robert McChesney's death in 2008, after which Mary remained there, continuing to work, until the late 2010s. During their time in Guadalajara, Mexico, she began writing seriously, publishing a story in "New Story," and embarking upon writing mystery novels, publishing her first in 1953. She also began writing articles for Art Digest, then for Artforum.[6][3]
She experimented with different sculpture formats, including wood and stone, before developing the cement mixed with vermiculite that she used for the majority of her work. She received her first public art commission for a work in Salinas, followed by her work for San Francisco General Hospital and many subsequent commissions.[3]
