Mary Evarts Steele 1919-2013

Mary Evarts Steele was born in New York City in 1919. She spent her early childhood on her family’s farm in Windsor, Vermont, where, inspired by the natural world around her, she began painting. She moved back to New York as a teenager and in the early 1940s studied painting at the Art Student’s League under the guidance of Morris Kantor.

She exhibited at various galleries in New York including the Brata Gallery (one of the iconoclastic 10th Street co-operative galleries of the early ‘60s) and later with Jan Weiss and Claire Dunphy. She moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2003 and showed at the Zeitgeist in Inman Square. She continued to paint until her death in 2013.

Although she painted portraits and landscapes throughout her life, her earlier work was predominantly non-representational. She matured as an abstract painter during the rise of Abstract Expressionism in New York, but, like many women artists at the time, found it difficult to gain recognition and representation beyond the small, co-operative galleries operating on the fringe of the staid New York art establishment.

As an adjunct to painting she began teaching art in the New York public school system and later became a registered art therapist working on a pediatric ward at Mt. Sinai Hospital. She believed in the transformative power of art and loved conveying this to children. She believed artistic expression could liberate children, whether imprisoned by disease on a hospital ward or by lack of opportunity in a ghetto school. She went on to teach art, in Spanish, to children in rural Puerto Rico and on the Amazon River in Iquitos, Peru.

Traveling became a great source of inspiration and ideas and notes for many paintings developed from travels through wilderness areas in the American Southwest, the Canadian Northwest Territories, and the Atlas Mountains in Morocco. These later paintings were more representational and often on larger canvases. Her deep, vivid coloration remained constant while her subject matter expanded through the natural world (at times to the political world) and, with the advent of space exploration, into the realm of the cosmos.

Throughout her career, drawing was an integral aspect of her art, and paintings often developed from sketches annotated with comments about coloration. She drew from live models in weekly sketch classes and developed a graceful, lyrical quality that characterizes her nudes. These seemingly effortless improvisations, often executed during a minute and a half pose, were a favorite format, about which she said, “You cannot think about it. You have to trust your hand.”

A fascination with the physical universe - the exploration of space - and the harmony of nature were her fundamental inspirations.