Mary Frank plucks what looks like a spoiled mushroom from her garden in Bearsville. Rosie, her trusty Havanese, stays close as Mary squeezes the mushroom between her fingers, releasing a cloud of spores into the late-summer air.
Mary, 93, collects several mushroom caps to take into her studio, where she will place them on paper and wait for their hidden patterns to appear. Then she snips Mexican sunflowers and zinnias for a bouquet.
“You haven’t heard of spore prints?” she asks, dismayed. She smiles and moves on to the flowers.
Inside, Mary’s husband, the 95-year-old musicologist Leo Treitler, sits in a motorized wheelchair while caregivers help him. A representative from Archtop Fiber has arrived to discuss the house’s unreliable internet. Phones ring and calls drop.
Mary appears unbothered, and returns to her studio. Art is everywhere. On the floor. On the ceiling.
“This has been a comparatively peaceful time,” she says one morning. “Often it goes right through the day like that.”
Mary no longer drives. A few days earlier, she called to ask whether I could bring her cherries and other fruit. Woodstock markets had none, so I arrived with barely ripe plums, peaches, and a half-gallon of whole milk. Friends bring groceries, give her rides, and help bridge the distance between her wooded home and the world beyond it.
She makes art every day.
Mary is a British-born American painter, sculptor, photographer, and printmaker who forged an independent figurative language when abstraction dominated the New York art world. Across a career spanning more than 70 years, her fractured bodies, animal forms, and mythic landscapes have influenced generations of artists. Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She has received two Guggenheim fellowships.
Yet Mary has never had a solo exhibition at a New York museum, an omission critics have increasingly challenged.
Her latest exhibition, “Out of Longing,” brings new paintings and drawings to Elena Zang Gallery in Shady, where they will remain on view through Sept. 20.
The title suits an artist whose figures seem perpetually to reach, flee, grieve, transform, or offer something up. Longing, in Mary’s work, is not passive. It has a body.
The garden is an extension of that work. Roots, feathers, chrysalises, mushroom spores, and the architecture of plants have entered her art for decades. Nothing is merely decoration. Everything is material, evidence of something greater, or a possible beginning.
Mary points toward willow trees in the distance.
“I planted those,” she says.
Her exhibition catalog is deliberately modest. She ordered 50 copies because she did not want to spend more money. She worries about the cost of maintaining homes in Manhattan and Bearsville. Someday, she says, she may have to sell the country house.
“That would be horrible,” Mary says. “Particularly because of the garden.”
Museum collections do not guarantee financial security, especially for an artist whose work has never been easy merchandise. David Hornung, a painter and teacher who curated Mary’s 2022 retrospective at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art in New Paltz, says the art world has become increasingly commercial while Mary’s work remains serious, challenging, and resistant to fashion.
“She still has the fire in the belly, for sure,” Hornung says. “And not just making art. I think she still has career ambitions, which is pretty inspiring.”
The art critic John Yau wrote in May that Mary has long deserved a New York museum exhibition. Her lack of one, he argued, was not simply neglect, but the result of prejudice against her aesthetic independence hardening into received wisdom.
A Child Under the Rose Garden
Mary was born Mary Lockspeiser in London in 1933, the only child of a painter, Eleanore Lockspeiser, and a musicologist and art writer, Edward Lockspeiser. As German bombs threatened the city, she was sent away at 6 to a succession of four boarding schools in the English countryside.
At one school, the children practiced air-raid drills in a shelter beneath a rose garden. They sat in gas masks and recited Church of England prayers. Mary, raised in a Jewish family that observed little, moved her mouth without knowing the words. The other children noticed.
She was bullied. She tried to run away from her school and failed. The gas mask remained with her as an image of terror. Masks would recur in her photography, drawings, sculpture, and theater work for decades. She made masks for The Open Theater, experimental theater group in New York City, active from 1963 to 1973.
At 7, she came to New York and lived with her maternal grandparents in Flatbush. She trained seriously as a dancer with Martha Graham, absorbing an understanding of the body as structure and gesture before she had a visual language of her own.
Then she met Robert Frank.
She was about 15, and he was nine years older, a Swiss photographer living in an illegal loft on East 11th Street in Manhattan. They married in 1950, when she was 17. Their son, Pablo, was born the next year, and their daughter, Andrea, followed in 1953.
Once, when an inspector came to determine whether the loft was being used illegally as a home, Mary hid the baby in the shower. The family lived in the two-floor loft on Third Avenue, a block above the Bowery, for about $100 a month. Men often idled nearby, Mary recalled, sometimes sleeping in the doorway. Around the corner, the Dutch-American abstract expressionist artist Willem de Kooning worked. Artists gathered outside galleries and at the Cedar Tavern to drink, argue, and measure one another’s greatness.
Mary didn’t jive with the scene.
“Mostly men,” she said. “There were few women.”
They argued over who used more paint. Abstraction was treated as the only serious language, while Mary kept drawing bodies and animals. Asked why, she remembered answering with a question: “Why aren’t you?”
“I was not only a woman artist, but I wasn’t an abstract artist,” Mary said. “So that put me really way out at the edge of not being part of it, even though I was living smack in the center of it.”
She knew Mark Rothko and de Kooning, and was endlessly inspired by the French artist Henri Matisse. One day, de Kooning called to her from across the street and asked whether she had ever received a grant. She said no. He put her forward for one without telling her; the money arrived later.
The anecdote captures the contradictions of that world. Mary was dismissed by its habits and helped by some of its most powerful men. Robert supported her art at a time when many male artists expected their wives to support them at home. His support had limits.
“He did support my work,” Mary said. “He did not really support me as a mother.”
Robert was away often, first for assignments and then longer. He photographed fashion because it paid, even as his own pictures went unsold for as little as $25. After he received the Guggenheim Fellowship that financed the travels behind “The Americans,” Mary joined him for part of the journey with Pablo and Andrea.
She flew with the children to Texas, expecting a warm climate. Instead, cattle stood in the snow. Andrea was still a baby, and Mary poured milk into empty soda bottles fitted with rubber nipples. The milk nearly froze, and strangers balked when she asked them to warm it.
The photographs that emerged from that journey would remake American photography.
She and Robert separated in 1969. That year, she began working with clay, building the large, fragmented female figures that brought her wide attention in the early 1970s. The bodies reclined, arched, broke open, and sometimes held landscapes within them. They appeared ancient and wounded, erotic and self-possessed.
“Her real heroes weren’t the Abstract Expressionists, even though she knew some of them,” Hornung said. “Her real heroes were early modernists like Picasso and Kathe Kollwitz,” along with artists such as Peter Schumann of Bread and Puppet Theater and Mimi Gross, who pursued work that was “narrative and joyfully democratic.”
Mary was included in the 1973 Whitney Biennial and received Guggenheim fellowships in 1973 and 1983. Yet the importance of her work, Hornung said, lies less in a list of honors than in what it made possible during the rise of the feminist art movement.
“Mary at that time became, I would say, one of the major models and inspirations for a lot of female artists,” he said.
What Grief Does to Time
Two deaths divided Mary’s life.
Andrea, 21, was killed in a plane crash in Guatemala in 1974. Pablo, who had schizophrenia, died by suicide in 1994 at 43.
Mary spoke of Pablo’s illness without diluting it. He disappeared for stretches. Sometimes she didn’t know where he was. He lived on the street, traveled, went to jail, and once set a fire. He was also, she said, deeply talented.
The losses entered her work, though not always in ways a viewer could recognize.
“People have ideas about grief, of how long it lasts,” she said. “’Oh, two years, it’s a little better.’”
She paused.
“It’s not true at all,” she said. “Everyone’s different, but still.”
Some works make their sorrow legible. Others contain it more privately. Mary said viewers who know nothing of her life can still sense something difficult in her art.
“Quite a bit of work of mine is disturbing to people,” she said. “Some people don’t mind to be, or they even want to be able to be disturbed.”
Mary’s figures don’t illustrate grief. They inhabit what grief does to scale and time. A torso becomes terrain. A hand reaches across a void. A body opens onto another body, an animal, a fire, or a horizon. A woman’s legs become calligraphy. A lone walker appears on many paths at once. The personal enlarges until it becomes mythic, but never impersonal.
Terry Tempest Williams, the writer and environmental activist, calls Mary a seer.
“She sees the future because she is so present,” Williams said. “She refuses to look away, and as a result we see ourselves more clearly.”
Mary met Williams in 1987 through Linda Asher, an editor at The New Yorker and a friend to Mary and Williams. Williams was a young writer from Utah. Mary was already an established artist. They recognized each other immediately.
“What drew me to her was her freedom to say what she felt and create what was in her soul unabashedly,” Williams said. “Her wildness.”
Williams describes their collaborations with a small equation, one plus one equals three. The third thing is the work neither could have made alone.
They later made three books during and after the pandemic: “A Burning Testament,” on fire; “What My Body Knows,” on women and the body; and “We Are Not Alone,” on extinction and the lives humans share the planet with.
“Everything she does is an offering,” Williams said. “Not precious. Not a big production.”
The World Is in the Work
Mary has never accepted the idea that art and political life can be sealed off from one another.
She made posters against the Vietnam War. After Donald Trump was first elected president, she designed a button bearing the word “TRUTH” and began giving it away. Someone suggested selling the buttons and donating the proceeds. Mary chose Planned Parenthood and said the effort has raised more than $28,000.
“It’s urgent to have to fight in whatever way you can every day,” she said, “whether it’s calling people, getting together, protesting.”
Her politics can be explicit, as in her posters, or absorbed into paintings and sculptures. Mary said activism has become more central to the work as the climate crisis has accelerated. She rejects the gentler phrase climate change.
“It sounds like, ‘Oh, I’m going to change my brand of coffee,'” she said.
She speaks of insects, plants, fish, birds, and mammals in the same moral register as people. Human life cannot be separated from drought, flood, fire, melting ice, poisoned water, or the disappearance of another species. The world is not the backdrop of Mary’s art. It is the subject and the medium.
Since the early 1990s, she has also advocated for solar cooking through Solar Cookers International, which promotes devices that use concentrated sunlight to cook food and purify water without fuel. Mary has built them, demonstrated them, and traveled on their behalf. Years ago, she and Treitler helped stage a demonstration outside the United Nations for representatives of 37 countries. Using 15 cardboard cookers, the group prepared meat, fish, bread, eggs, cake, and vegetables, and purified water.
People tasted the food and wept, Mary recalled, because a humble object had made visible a different way to live.
“To see those people with tears streaming down their faces,” she said, “was, for me, I think, one of the great events of my life.”
Mary distrusts advertising, celebrity, and an art market that rewards work for its sellability and trendiness. She exchanges and barters whenever possible. She has traded art for clothes, lodging, and services. A woman with about 40 goats brings her vegetables; Mary gives her work.
“People have things,” she said, “but they don’t think like that because they’ve been conditioned and programmed to buy everything.”
Williams said Mary recently called and sang her an old Jewish melody, a lament that was also a celebration of being alive.
“That was the greatest gift,” Williams said.
Mary is frank about aging. It’s not ideal. Yet, it hasn’t made her retreat. Instead, she’s digging deeper.
She still tells students and younger artists to observe the world in its many forms and spend time in museums, especially with work they initially dislike. Stay long enough, she tells them, for the offensive or uninteresting thing to disclose something extraordinary, perhaps only in one corner.
She is equally interested in the reactions of people who know nothing about art.
“They tell me interesting things about their life or what the work said to them,” Mary said. “And it’s often things that I never saw myself in the work.”
Outside, the garden keeps making its own revisions. Some years, hundreds of poppies return. This year, only a few did. The yellow swallowtails arrived before the monarchs. A heron once ate the fish from Mary’s small pond and left their polished skeletons on a stone, as if signing its work.
“Gardening is really interesting, not just the beauty of it, but the whole phenomenon of what’s in the earth underneath,” Mary said. “How roots intertwine, or don’t.”
As Mary gathers mushrooms and flowers, I think of a visit to Utah that Williams described. There, Mary spit into her palm, picked up sage and stone, and made an image with what the desert offered.
“What was at hand was the earth,” Williams said, “and what she created was a prayer.”
Noah Eckstein is the editor-in-chief of The Overlook. Send correspondence to noah@theoverlooknews.com.
