Mary Dill Henry

Narrative timeline

We want to know why we exist. We want to know the answer to the questions of from whence we came and to where we go. We do not know but we keep searching anyway. Perhaps we come close to it when we are creating something of lasting beauty. Cannot we all be eternal?
– Mary Henry 1913–2009

Caravan

The family moves to Helena, Arkansas.

The family moves from Arkansas to Los Altos Hills, California, where they are joined by Mary's mother. Since women artists were not taken seriously by local galleries, Mary started a design business called Architectural Art Services i9n the mid…

Mary wins first prize in the “McCall's Kitchen Contest.” Contestants were required to redesign their own kitchens, submitting highly detailed plans. The two first prize-winners had their kitchens remodeled, down to the dishes, glasses, and silverwar…

Mary wins first prize in the “McCall's Kitchen Contest.” Contestants were required to redesign their own kitchens, submitting highly detailed plans. The two first prize-winners had their kitchens remodeled, down to the dishes, glasses, and silverwar…

Mary works on numerous free-lance assignments, including billboards, murals, and mosaics. On her own time, she begins doing small works in tempera, crosshatched in black ink.

Mary and Wilbur are divorced, and Mary moves to Mendocino. For the first time, she has the space and leisure to paint large canvases.

By the mid-1960s, with the children in college and now fiercely independent as an ardent feminist, Mary decided that she had had enough of being a wife and mother and divorced Wilbur Henry.  She then used the alimony first to travel abroad to E…

A major shift came in her work after she visited Alaska and stayed with a friend for several months in 1975.  Influenced by the pale tones and broad expanse of the Alaskan glaciers, she now started to paint huge horizontal panels in addition to…

Mary sells her Everett houses and buys an old farmhouse near Freeland on Whidbey Island, Washington. The Whidbey house is set on six acres of land, and Mary begins to transform it into a landscaped English-style garden. She falls into a routine of g…

Mary Henry worked for over forty years, exhibiting at over a dozen galleries during that stretch.  She lived below the poverty line but never stinted on her materials or professional photography.  Occasionally she sold something, and her p…

The archive project began in earnest and has only recently been completed, and renewed interest in her work has been growing ever since…