Mary Fuller Matchesney was teaching the arts of adult education in Port Richmond, California when she was forced to make a choice. It was the heyday of the Red Scare in 1951, when the state ordered all civil servants to sign radical beliefs, especially an oath denying communism.
She refused and was fired.
Left-wing artist Machezny and her husband Robert Machezny, who were at the heart of the Bay Area art scene in the late 1940s, soon joined dozens of intellectuals and were a wave of authoritarianism clashing with the West. I was afraid. The coast. They bought a Model A postal truck, converted it into a camper van, and headed to Guadalajara, Mexico.
The couple stayed there for only a year until they ran out of money. However, at that time, Mr. Matchesney was transformed.
Her early paintings and sculptures in the 1940s were mostly abstract in line with the times. But in Mexico, she was fascinated by pre-Columbian art and, along with it, Aztec and Maya mythology.
After her and her husband returned to the Bay Area, Matchesney developed a technique for blending cement with vermiculite, a mineral that slows the drying process. Once in basic shape, I used a knife and rasp to carve stones into the zoo of bears, owls, crocodiles, cats, and the fantastic beast and totem goddess.
“She was out of the mainstream because she really had no influence other than mythology,” said Dennis Calabi, a friend and gallerist who showed her work, in a telephone interview.
Dozens of sculptures by Matchesney in the woods around her house on the isolated mountaintop of Sonoma County are inspired by her encounter with pre-Columbian traditions and her desire to create a new feminine-centric aesthetic. I did.
“I strongly feel that creating viable and true feminist art requires bypassing the entire patriarchal ideology and vision. We somehow have that for the real notion of women and men. All of the falsehoods and distortions need to be regained, “she said in a 1992 artist’s statement.
Machesney, who frequently used her maiden name Fuller as a professional, did not spread her celebrity as an artist, but her sculptures can be found today in parks, private gardens, public squares, and outdoors throughout California. increase. San Francisco General Hospital And at the zoo in the city.
She died on May 4th at the Assisted Living Center in Petaluma, a few miles from Sonoma Mountain, Karabi said. She was 99 years old.
Mary Ellen Wilson was born on October 20, 1922 in Wichita, Kansas. Her father, Robert Fuller, met Mary’s mother, Karen Rasmussen, an English nurse in the United Kingdom when she was sent to Europe during World War I. At the age of two, her family moved to Stockton, California, hoping to start a farm.
Fuller struggled with farming and eventually became a Pacific Gas and Electric plumber. Mrs. Fuller served in the Women’s Army Corps during World War II, and she later worked for the American Legion.
Although Mary grew up poorly, her excellent grades earned her a full scholarship to study philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. Like many students in the late 1930s, she protested America’s involvement in the next war in Europe, but never said whether she officially participated as a member of the Communist Party. did. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June, she reversed her position. 1941.
In the turmoil of the world, she sat in a philosophy seminar and was indignant and eager to do something with her own hands. She graduated from college three years later for her work as a welder at the vast Kaiser Shipyards in the Bay Area of Richmond, California.
After the war, she became a disciple of a pottery company and was immediately able to get her tableware for sale at a luxury department store in San Francisco.
She also began writing about the Bay Area art scene, which was the base of Abstract Expressionism on the West Coast in the late 1940s. She became friends with artists such as Clyfford Still, Richard Diebenkorn, Ad Reinhardt, and Matchesney, whom she met at the opening of the gallery. They got married in 1949.
Mr. Matchesney died in 2008. Mr. Matchesney has not left any direct survivors.
Prior to his stay in Mexico, Machezny was a seasoned artist and had won several awards at art competitions throughout the state. She was also widely recognized as a critic and art historian. She has contributed to magazines such as Art Digest and interviewed dozens of New Deal artists from the Smithsonian Castle.
In 1973 she published “Exploration Period: San Francisco 1945-1950”. And I took advantage of an interview she had with her contemporaries. In this book, she discusses the Bay Area’s importance to the early postwar art movement, especially to Abstract Expressionism, which has been the focus of attention in recent decades.
Matchesney eventually settled near the summit of Mount Sonoma, north of San Francisco Bay, where he exchanged his workforce for an acre of land and manually built a house at the end of a five-mile road. They grew their own food and lived on the venison that Mr. Matchesney had secured from his hunting excursions.
By the mid-1950s, Ms. Matchesney had almost exclusively focused on her art. However, to achieve her goals, she occasionally wrote all mysterious novels in pseudonyms, such as “Victims were important” (1954) and “In search of trouble” (1955). ..
She went to the printed page again in the 1970s and repeatedly attacked the French artist Christ with his work. “Running fence” A 24.5 mile long cloth fence that straddles Sonoma and Marin counties.
She told the newspaper The PointReyes Light in 2016, “Conjob, a large theater show,” “another example of how Europeans think of Americans: we’re a lot of idiots.” ..
Christ accused her of defamation, but when she refused to withdraw the article, he withdrew the case.
