Mary Dill Henry Papers, 1913-2021

Mary Dill Henry (1913-2009) was an American artist whose work included abstract paintings and large-scale mosaics and murals.

Born in Sonoma, California, Mary attended the California College of the Arts in Oakland, graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1938. Her teachers included modernists Ethel Abeel, Glen Wessels, and Marie Togni. Mary also studied lithography with Ray Bertrand at the San Francisco School of Fine Arts in 1941. She married Wilbur Henry in 1940 and, while Wilbur attended Stanford University for a Masters in Biology, Mary moved to Iowa to teach at Iowa State University's Ames campus until 1943. Wilbur enlisted in the army in 1942 and Mary moved back to California for the birth of their first child, Suzanne, in 1944.

In 1945, while Wilbur was still in the military, Mary moved to Chicago with her mother and daughter to study with László Moholy-Nagy at the Institute of Design (now part of the Illinois Institute of Technology). Moholy-Nagy initiated the School of Design in Chicago in 1939, which became the Institute of Design in 1944. Mary had been inspired to study with Moholy-Nagy after attending a lecture he gave at Mills College in Oakland, California in 1940. She followed the Bauhaus curriculum at the Institute, including photography, architecture, and design. Study under Moholy-Nagy had a significant impact on Henry: "He was amazing. He talked about art that wasn't what you saw, but what you believed. It was like a whole new world opened up for me." [1] Mary graduated from the Institute of Design in 1946 with her Masters in Fine Arts.

Mary moved to Arkansas in 1946 with Wilbur when he was hired to work at the state's Department of Health. In 1947, Mary gave birth to their second child, William, in Little Rock. In 1949, the Henry family returned to Los Altos Hills, California to live on Wilbur's family fruit ranch.

During the 1950s, Mary focused on design projects. She submitted detailed designs to a "Design Your Dream Kitchen" contest in McCall's magazine in 1952 and won first prize. From 1953 to 1955, she worked for Don Clever's commercial art firm in San Francisco on a variety of assignments, including mural designs for the bar at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel and the Emporium's Mezzanine Restaurant. In 1955, Mary founded a business specializing in large-scale murals and mosaics called Architectural Arts whose projects included murals for Manning's Coffee House restaurant in Los Angeles, a mural for the Santa Clara County Courthouse, mosaic walls for two banks in Palo Alto, and a mural and mosaics for Hewlett-Packard.

In the early 1960s, Mary moved to a house in Mendocino, California and recommitted herself to painting. She and Wilbur divorced in 1966 and she turned her Mendocino home into an inn to support herself while painting. At this time, Mary's art used oscillating shapes in kinetic patterns, a style that aligned with the Op Art movement that came to prominence in the 1960s. Mary's paintings were featured in her first solo exhibitions in 1967 and 1968 at the Ampex Corporation in Redwood City, California, and her first gallery show took place in 1969 at the Arleigh Gallery in San Francisco.

In 1976, Mary moved to Everett, Washington to live closer to her daughter, Suzanne, and son-in-law, John Rahn. She spent that summer in a master class with Abstract Expressionist Jack Tworkov at the Centrum Foundation in Port Townsend, Washington, and made connections with a number of prominent local artists. Tragically, Mary's son William was killed in a car accident in 1979.

In 1980, Mary's paintings were shown for the first time in Seattle at the Gallery Diane Gilson. In 1982, she purchased a farmhouse on Whidbey Island, Washington, where she turned a woodshed on the property into her studio and cultivated an English-style garden. In the 1980s, Mary's paintings were shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions in the Pacific Northwest. During the 1990s and 2000s, Mary's work was regularly exhibited in solo exhibitions at galleries and museums.

References: [1] Quoted in Sheila Farr, "Mary Henry: 93 Years of Life and Art," Seattle Times, February 23, 2007.