Image: Mary McCleary. Photo: Rufus Lovett
Glasstire has published a profile of the collage artist Mary McCleary as part of its East Texas Artists Series. The piece, written by Emmi Hasselbach, traces how a lifelong attention to objects, pattern and craft shaped one of the region’s best-known studio practices.
Born in Houston in 1951, McCleary has lived in Nacogdoches for about 50 years and taught at Stephen F. Austin State University from 1975 to 2005. Her work has been shown across the United States and abroad, including at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Dallas Museum of Art and the San Antonio Museum of Art.
She grew up among books, antiques and decorative arts, with frequent visits to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and to historic house museums. The women in her family made detailed needlework, from hand-dyed hooked rugs to stitched monograms, and McCleary links that patient handwork to her own approach.
Her training was in printmaking. At Texas Christian University she worked mainly in etching, drawn to the medium by her professor David Conn, and at the University of Oklahoma she studied drawing, lithography and silkscreen. She has since made six prints with Flatbed Press in Austin.
After arriving at Stephen F. Austin, she began making abstract, geometric mixed-media drawings, then started cutting, folding and building up the paper. Finding that she often preferred antique shows, folk-art museums and decorative-arts collections to conventional museums, she turned to the richly worked surfaces she saw there. The collages grew from geometric compositions into figurative scenes, layered from paper, drawing, paint and found materials.
Every figure in her work is a portrait, often of friends, family or people from Nacogdoches. Ideas can wait years before becoming a collage: one began with an account of Henry David Thoreau accidentally setting fire to woods near Lexington. McCleary prefers meanings to reveal themselves slowly, comparing good art to poetry or a novel whose sense grows over time.
According to the profile, a collage typically takes her three to four months, and her largest works have required up to 15 months. McCleary is represented by Moody Gallery in Houston.
