Mary Fuller McChesney was teaching adult education art in Port Richmond, California, when she was forced to make a choice. It was 1951, the height of the red terror, and the state had ordered all officials to sign an oath rejecting radical beliefs, especially communism.
She refused and was fired.
Ms. McChesney and her husband, Robert McChesney, both left-wing artists who had been at the center of the Bay Area’s art scene in the late 1940s, soon joined dozens of intellectuals fleeing what they feared a wave of authoritarianism would crash over the West Coast. They bought a Model A Mailcar, converted it into a campervan and drove to Guadalajara, Mexico.
The couple only stayed there for a year, until they ran out of money. But by that time, Mrs. McChesney had been transformed.
Her early paintings and sculptures, in the 1940s, had been largely abstract, befitting the zeitgeist. But in Mexico she became fascinated with pre-Columbian art, and with it Aztec and Mayan mythology.
After she and her husband returned to the Bay Area, Ms. McChesney developed a technique that involved mixing cement and vermiculite, a mineral that slows the drying process. Once she had a basic shape, she tackled it with a knife and grater and cut the stone into bears, owls, alligators, cats, and a menagerie of fantastical beasts and totem goddesses.
“She really didn’t have any influences other than mythology, so she was way out of the mainstream,” Dennis Calabi, a friend and gallery owner who showed her work, said in a phone interview.
The sculptures of Mrs. McChesney, dozens of whom populated the woods surrounding her home on a remote peak in Sonoma County, were inspired both by her encounter with pre-Columbian traditions and by her desire to create a new female-centric aesthetic.
“I strongly believe that in order to create a viable, real, feminist art, we have to get around the whole patriarchal ideology and vision; we have to somehow get behind all this falsity and distortion of an authentic concept of women and men,” she said in a 1992 artist statement.
While Mrs. McChesney — who professionally often used her maiden name Fuller — never achieved widespread fame as an artist, today her sculptures can be found all over California, in parks, private gardens, and public plazas, as well as outside San Francisco General Hospital and the zoo. from the city.
She died May 4 at a residential care facility in Petaluma, a few miles from Sonoma Mountain, Mr. Calabi. She was 99.
Mary Ellen Fuller was born on October 20, 1922 in Wichita, Kansas. Her father, Robert Fuller, had met Mary’s mother, an English nurse named Karen Rasmussen, in Britain while serving in Europe during World War I. was 2, the family moved to Stockton, California, hoping to start a farm.
Mr. Fuller struggled with farming and eventually became a pipe fitter for Pacific Gas & Electric. Ms. Fuller served in the Women’s Army Corps during World War II and later worked for the American Legion.
Mary grew up poor, but with great grades, she managed to get a full scholarship to study philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. Like many college students in the late 1930s, she protested American involvement in the coming war in Europe, but as someone affiliated with the Communist Party—she never said she had officially joined—she came to her stand when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941.
While the world was in turmoil, when she sat in philosophy seminars, she got irritated and longed to do something with her hands. She dropped out of college after three years to take a job as a welder at the sprawling Kaiser Shipyards in Richmond, California, in the Bay Area.
After the war, she was apprenticed to a ceramics company, where she proved so adept that she soon had her own line of tableware for sale at high-end department stores in San Francisco.
She also began writing about the Bay Area art scene, which was the West Coast base for Abstract Expressionism in the late 1940s. She befriended artists such as Clyfford Still, Richard Diebenkorn, Ad Reinhardt and Mr. McChesney, whom she had met at a gallery opening. They married in 1949.
Mr. McChesney died in 2008. Mrs. McChesney leaves no immediate survivors.
Even before her residency in Mexico, Mrs. McChesney was an accomplished artist, winning several first prizes in art competitions across the state. She was also widely regarded as a critic and art historian, writing for magazines such as Art Digest and interviewing dozens of New Deal artists for the Smithsonian Institution.
In 1973 she published “A Period of Exploration: San Francisco 1945-1950”, based on interviews she had conducted with her contemporaries. In the book, she argued for the importance of the Bay Area to early post-war art movements, especially Abstract Expressionism, a view that has gained popularity in recent decades.
The McChesneys eventually settled near the top of Sonoma Mountain, north of San Francisco Bay, where they bartered labor for an acre of land, then hand-built a house at the end of an 8-mile road. They grew their own food and subsisted on the game that Mr. McChesney had gotten from his hunting trips.
By the mid-1950s, Mrs. McChesney focused almost exclusively on her art—but to make ends meet she occasionally wrote mystery novels, including “The Victim Was Important” (1954) and “Asking for Trouble” (1955). ), all under pseudonyms.
She went to print again in the 1970s, when she repeatedly attacked French artist Christo for his work “Running Fence,” a 34.5-mile fabric fence that stretched across Sonoma and Marin Counties.
It was, she told The Point Reyes Light newspaper in 2016, “a scam, a big theater show” and “another example of how Europeans think about Americans: that we’re a bunch of idiots.”
Christo sued her for libel, but when she refused to withdraw her articles, he dropped the case.
