Mary Sherville Austin

Mary’s parents, Arthur Austin and Dorothy Sharp, met and married in Denver, Colorado, where her father served as the dashing young pastor of the Epiphany Episcopal mission and the lovely Dorothy Sharp was the secretary at the church’s “Sunshine Mission.” Photographs of the period show Dorothy and Arthur as a happy, healthy, outdoorsy couple who loved to hike and picnic with friends and relatives in the beautiful Colorado countryside. Not long after their marriage, the couple was posted to Louisville, Kentucky to serve in one of the poorest parishes in the country. There, surrounded by abject poverty, Arthur and Dorothy welcomed their four children: Arthur Jr., William, John, and Mary.

From one of the poorest parishes, Father Austin was next sent to head up one of the Church’s wealthiest parishes, that of Newport, Rhode Island. The Church provided the young family with a grand three-story seaside home known as the “Old Dennis House” built by sea Captain John Dennis circa 1740. It featured the finest Widow’s Walk in Newport, with its spectacular view of Narangansett Bay. Mary fondly remembered her bedroom on the second floor which in recent times, became a popular and pricey bed-and-breakfast!

Tragically, Mary’s father died too young, at 50, of cancer. This was a tragedy for the entire Austin family, and a sad end to Mary’s idyllic days by the sea playing with her beloved father in the sand. Mary was 7 years old. A family close to the Austins—Captain Sawtelle, his wife, and four children—offered to have the Austins join them in their permanent home in Cape Elizabeth, Maine. The Sawtelle family home, called Cragmoor, stood on the rocky edge of a cliff overlooking the sea.

Mary’s partner in crime in Cape Elizabeth was Jane Wray, her best friend from the age of 8. Jane and Mary were both tomboys who loved nothing better than to dress up as cowboys after school. They attended the same schools, beginning with Cape Elementary, to Cape Elizabeth High School, and then on to the posh girls’ academy, Wayneflete. Mary and Jane couldn’t stand Wayneflete. Some of the prim, snobby, “old maid”-type teachers looked down on these two trouble-makers. Jane was much more interested in athletics than school, and Mary had great difficulty in reading—she was often called stupid by her teachers. Her difficulties, however, were due to severe dyslexia, something not understood at that time. Later in life, Mary and Jane would both turn out to be gay, and to be wonderful artists and painters.

As teenagers, Mary and Jane were obsessed with movie stars, particularly the women. They would buy every issue of Photoplay and Screen Magazines as soon as they came out. On Saturdays they would go to the Cape Theater to see the latest movies. Mary’s favorite movie star of all time was Doris Day.

Mary managed to graduate from the hated Wayneflete, and after an unsuccessful year at Glendale Junior College in California, where she stayed with relatives, returned to Cape Elizabeth. Mary’s oldest brothers, Art and Billy, had long since left for higher education and successful careers in medicine and business. John, the older brother closest to her in age, continued as her companion and protector, until he too, was off to start his career path, leading to curator for ceramics and glass at Colonial Williamsburg.

At the age of 19, then, with barely more than a high school education, Mary left Cape Elizabeth for Boston, Massachusetts, with her family’s love & a mother’s hope, but without any appreciable resources, credentials or mentors, to make her way in life.

Mary’s very first job was with the Boston School for the Blind, where, without any training or experience, she was given responsibility for dozens of students. Mary’s extraordinary gift for working with children and her tremendous work ethic made her an immediate favorite of the children and her new employers.

At 22, Mary was working for a gallery in Boston’s lovely Back Bay, on Boylston Street. Every day on her way to and from work, Mary had to pass by another gallery, located underneath hers, called The Botolph Gallery. The Botolph was founded by Celia Hubbard in 1954, a well-known artist, designer, and antique dealer. It was at the Botolph that Mary first met Rita Di Lisi, the woman who would change her life forever. Soon, Mary was stopping by every day to spend time with both the people and artworks of The Botolph. In spite of Mary’s inability to type, or spell, or file paperwork, Celia hired Mary as a secretary: everyone just liked having Mary around. It didn’t hurt that she was a terrifically hard worker, who helped anyone with anything. One day, Rita came across a small drawing on plain paper that caught her attention. She was charmed by its sure, simple linework and asked who had done it. Mary said she had been doodling. Rita excitedly asked her to “keep doodling” and soon Mary was making numerous drawings, of ordinary things such as furniture, dishware, plumbing etc. Rita and Celia found these early drawings to be completely charming and original. This was the first inkling that Mary had of her artistic ability, and she ran with it enthusiastically, guided and nurtured by Rita. As Mary wrote in her moving tribute to Rita upon her passing, too soon, in 2014: “You were that short, wild Italian who took hold of me and released me from my staid New England self—you took note of my creativity—you encouraged and nurtured me and my earliest artistic efforts—you became a wonderful mentor and friend in my life.”

Mary’s association with Rita and others in her circle led to a number of commercial art commissions. These included Mary’s contract to provide book covers for Schenckmann Publishing, a small Harvard print shop for publications in the social sciences; graphic design jobs for local Cambridge businesses; book illustrations for two books: The Universal Bead, and The Sun Chief; a large mural for Boston’s famous French restaurant, Jacques; and even a contract to re-design the Dalmatian dog cartoon figure used as a logo by the National Fire Safety Commission.

All this while, Mary lived the Bohemian life of a freelance artist. She rented a 3rd floor walkup apartment on Athens Street in Cambridge just off Harvard Square. Her neighbors on the street included other artists, writers, filmmakers, and architects. This artistic community had the luxury of experimentation in the arts, as most of these apartments were rent-controlled. Mary’s apartment cost only $50.00 per month, and she didn’t even have to pay that, since she had made a deal with her elderly Italian landlady to waive rent in exchange for taking out the weekly garbage for her building.

Meanwhile, Rita had been thinking for some years about innovative ways of teaching art to young children. One day her friend Celia Hubbard asked Rita if she would like to start a children’s art school of her own, where she could test and carry out her ideas. Rita was thrilled, and in 1963, “Project, Inc.” was formed, funded by Celia Hubbard. Within three years, it swelled to over 200 students and expanded on demand to include evening classes for parents and other adults who wanted to have this exciting new educational experience for themselves. Rita served as Director, and Mary was her all-purpose Assistant. Its distinguished faculty now offered ceramics, photography, and mixed-media, alongside its core painting and drawing classes. Its Board of Directors boasted many of the region’s top educators, corporate leaders, and political officeholders. For the next 10 years, the Project art school thrived. Rita was often invited to lecture about the Project school at area Colleges and Universities. One of the school’s chief admirers was Harvard University, which made an offer to have the school operate under its umbrella. This would have solved forever the challenge of sufficient funding to cover the high costs associated with providing quality art supplies and faculty for its growing student body. However, Rita turned Harvard down, concerned that Project’s unique approach might be watered down and too regimented by close association with such a powerful academic sponsor.

During the years at Project, from 1963 to 1973, Mary worked tirelessly as Rita’s Assistant. While the theory and design of the unique teaching methods of Project were Rita’s alone, Mary immediately and intuitively grasped Rita’s vision, and worked side-by-side with her to help bring it to life. The generous and steady salary from Project gave her financial security for the first time. Even with all the long days and nights working at Project, and helping Rita with other outside tasks, Mary continued to develop her own art. In addition to painting and drawing, she became accomplished in silk screening, graphic design, animation, and 3-dimensional structure.

In 1973, however, Rita had to resign the Directorship in order to provide full-time care for her elderly relatives (remember, she was Italian!) at their family home in Long Island. Project, Inc. continued under other stewardship until financial considerations finally forced its closure in 1984. Mary’s full-time work with Project ended when Rita left. Mary then returned to the many art-related entrepreneurial activities by which she supported herself.

Mary was often ahead of her times in so many ways. Just one example: to help with the desperate plight of whales, now emerging in the news at this time, giving rise to Greenpeace and other animal groups in the early 1970s, Mary made wonderful line drawings of three sea mammals: the blue whale, the humpback whale, and the “killer whale,” which was actually the Orca dolphin. She had these drawings reproduced commercially onto oval-shaped button pins, against a creamy white background. One of the animal groups that emerged at that time was Friends of Animals, and Mary sent a sample of her “whale” pins to them, asking if they thought these could be helpful in raising awareness and money for the whale cause. They excitedly replied, “Yes!” and Mary donated her whale pin design to them. Friends of Animals made and sold thousands of Mary’s whale pins over the next several years. It was the first time that button pins had been used to assist with an animal cause, not just political campaigns. When an all-women’s mountain climbing team successfully placed two women at the top of Annapurna Mountain in north-central Nepal for the first time, in 1978, they placed a set of Mary’s whale pins at the summit.

Another example is Mary’s fascination with Polaroid photographs. In 1973, she bought a Polaroid camera and began taking lots of these instant-developing photographs. One weekend she took a lot of closeup Polaroid pictures of herself, extending out her arm to hold the camera out in front or to the side of her—Mary was taking “selfies”! These photos came out blurry and soft-focused, the colors and light blending into abstract shapes. She was excited by the effects she was getting, and was eager to do more experimentation, but Polaroid film was very expensive. She took her trove of photographs to the Polaroid Corporation, which had its national headquarters in Cambridge at that time and showed them to the Director in charge of selecting photographers to display their work in the company’s Gallery. The Director said, “You have managed to obtain effects this company has made it our corporate mission to make impossible!” But he was entranced. He gave her a show and as much Polaroid film as she could carry out of the building. While not the first selfies, I think Mary’s Polaroid show may have been the earliest documented exhibit of them.

My friend Susan Woll, an independent filmmaker, lived in the same building as Mary. Susan’s husband Ed was an architect, who was Mary’s favorite “junking” partner. In 1974, when I was 28 and Mary was 37, Susan introduced me to Mary at a meeting of Filmwomen of Boston, a group I had founded. We began to see each other right away. The first time I visited her apartment, I walked in to see 4 or 5 women sitting at tables working on sewing machines. They were making giant ‘Moon Pillows’ that Mary had designed and was selling at a craft shop nearby. They were beautiful, 3-foot square stuffed pillows in a fabulous blue fabric on which a magnificent crescent half-moon in glowing white fabric was raised up on the surface.

Another of Mary’s money-making schemes was her annual reselling of Harvard students’ furniture. Each year, the Harvard students living in dormitories would have to empty their rooms of all furniture in preparation for next year’s incoming students. Most didn’t bother to take any furniture with them, they just put everything out on the sidewalk for pick-up by the city. Mary would gather these discards into her car and move them into a couple of garages she rented at the end of Athens Street. When she had a good haul, she would bring the goods out and re-sell the furniture and other odds-and-ends to the new incoming students. In no time, she had plenty of customers and made quite a bit of money in this way.

Mary had always dreamed of moving out to California, where the climate was warm and the spaces were big. In 1978, we took the plunge, and after selling all our belongings in a giant garage sale, we packed up our newly purchased 1972 orange and white VW Bus, and picked up two passengers: a friend who had a nurse-anesthetist job waiting in San Diego, and our new 6-month puppy Amelia Earhart (black Labrador/spaniel mix). We headed for Santa Cruz on the California central coast, a place I had read about on the label of an herbal tea bag. I was 28, and Mary was 41.

In Santa Cruz, we quickly became regular vendors at the popular Santa Cruz Flea Market, which operated on weekends days, before the space turned into one of the state’s last drive-in movie theaters at night. In the early hours of the morning, as I was setting up the booth, Mary would troll the other booths to see what she could buy for us to sell that day. She was great at that. By the time customers came, we would have a booth full of wares, and made a good profit. Mary loved the flea market life, its freedom and action. Unlike the often-stodgy Victoriana and colonial collectibles of New England, California offered lots of Bakelite, Hawaiian shirts, Art Deco, and mid-century modern, all of which Mary loved.

Eventually, Mary was accepted into a first-rate dealers’ collective on the main street of Santa Cruz, called Moderne Life. She rented a large space in the back and specialized in Art Deco and mid-century furniture and accessories. Meanwhile, I worked in a support position for the University of California Santa Cruz Extension.

In 1989, however, disaster struck: the central coast was rocked by a major 7.1 earthquake, whose epicenter was just a quarter mile from our house. Almost 50% of the Santa Cruz downtown collapsed, and Moderne Life was destroyed. Some overflow merchandise that Mary had stored outside the city, was luckily spared. To continue to sell, we had to look for a market outside the earthquake-affected area. The one we chose was the Sausalito flea market, just across the Golden Gate Bridge, one of the best markets in northern California. We began to travel to Sausalito on weekends.

One weekend at Sausalito, after searching for items from other vendors to resell while I was setting up, Mary came back to the booth with some strange items under each arm. These turned out to be hand-carved wooden Angels from the Philippines, with hand-painted glass eyes that terrified me (I have a doll phobia…). Mary said she had bought them from a Filipino vendor named Charlie, who had lots more handcarved things in his booth. Long story short, those handcarved pieces sold, and each time we went to Sausalito, we bought more and more things from Charlie. We would load our van with them and start driving around California looking for towns that might have retail stores interested in carrying these products. We enjoyed discovering beautiful areas of the state, such as the mission towns of San Luis Obispo and San Juan Bautista, and northern towns like Mill Valley and Petaluma. Before we knew it, we were receiving 20-foot containers into the port of Oakland, filled with handcarved wooden decorative items. Charlie half in jest suggested we call our business “Charlie’s Angels” after the popular but often sexist 1970s TV show. We laughed and countered with, “No, we’ll call it ‘Mary’s Angels’” and so it was.

We eventually leased a 4,000 sq.ft. warehouse in Sand City, the industrial part of Monterey. To save money, we built an efficiency apartment right inside the warehouse. Thus, in 1994, Mary and I moved into the warehouse, just steps away from sand dunes on the beautiful shores of Monterey Bay. Mary’s Angels continued to thrive over the next 7 years, during which time I began to take entry-level courses in anthropology, my personal passion, at the Monterey Peninsula Community College.

We hired a young man named Uriel Sanchez: at 17, this was Uriel’s first job, and he loved working there. Mary was a great manager, and he was eager to learn, soon becoming a very good salesman himself. The only problem was that Uriel was so handsome that some of our female customers would stop by just to flirt with him. When he accompanied us to a restaurant once, he drew a crowd of admirers, who thought he was a novela (soap opera) TV star.

Once again, however, fate intervened when the tragedy of September 11, 2001 struck our nation. For months afterward, almost no one came into the warehouse to buy. The whole of the Monterey Peninsula economy was devastated: the once lively Monterey shopping mall became a ghost town, as business after business closed and was boarded up. Very reluctantly, we had to let Uriel go. Fortunately, he was hired just three days later by a hazard-reduction company at a substantially higher rate of pay than we had been able to afford.

Over the next two years, we limped along financially, but retail business on the Peninsula remained very slow. Eventually we came to the sad conclusion that the central coast of California was no longer a place where our business could support us long-term. Despite a continued downturn in retail sales, business rents and expenses continued to be high. We needed a more affordable place to live.

We had traveled to New Mexico on several occasions, visiting Mary’s nephew and his wife, ceramic artist Lisa Smith (www.lisasmithceramics.com) in Santa Fe. Mary loved the bright, low-latitude light of the state, its big sky, and bold colors. Just outside Santa Fe, a terrific, world-renowned outdoor marketplace, the Tesuque Pueblo Flea Market, was set on a beautiful mesa. The tribe allowed vendors to build permanent wooden booths to keep their merchandise safe during the season, March through October, open every Fri.-Sun. Our woodcarvings reflected the Spanish colonial style so cherished by Santa Fe and others in the Southwest. Just the thought of moving to New Mexico excited Mary’s interest in doing artwork again. For me, the clincher was the presence of the University of New Mexico Anthropology Department, in Albuquerque, rated one of the top five best anthropology departments in the country.

Thus, in early February of 2004, we drove our van to Albuquerque, followed by an 18-wheeler that contained all our personal belongings and enough merchandise to last us until we could bring a future container from the West Coast to Albuquerque. We rented a pleasant 2-bedroom apartment and several storage units nearby and by August 1st we were selling at the Market, and what a market it was! Almost 200 vendors from 30 different countries, their colorful and varied wares displayed on the beautiful Tesuque mesa just outside Santa Fe. Our booth of Spanish colonial decorative arts fit right in. We did very well right from the beginning and were happy to be a part of this extraordinary marketplace.

In 2006 Mary and I were very happy to finally be able to purchase our first home, close to the University of New Mexico, where I was taking graduate-level courses in preparation for making formal application to the University. The house was one of 18 adobe townhouses backed up against the city golf course, with mountain views both front and back.

Using the free-standing garage on our property as her studio, Mary began to paint. Her work now almost entirely consisted of large abstract expressionist works, displayed at our flea market booth. Even while having to show her paintings next to such strikingly different objects as the Philippine woodcarvings, Mary’s paintings drew the attention of customers, and she sold well.

In 2010, the art director for the upcoming excellent film Secretariat, came to the Tesuque market and saw Mary’s paintings there. He liked them so much that he leased six of her art works for the film, as well as buying 2 of her paintings outright for himself. One of the paintings, of a large Turqoise tree, was featured prominently in the movie during a lengthy scene with Diane Lane lying on a bed in a New York hotel room while she had an important phone call with her family. The painting was so large on the screen that Mary’s signature was about a foot high and could be clearly seen from the back of the movie theatre, where Mary and I and several of our friends sat in a row together. Mary was tremendously pleased to see her art on the big screen!

In 2012, Mary suffered a severe adverse reaction to a routine corticosteroid injection for a case of plantar fasciitis. She was hospitalized with steroid psychosis, from which she eventually made a substantial recovery, more than her doctors had expected given her age of 75. However, her balance and walking ability were permanently affected. She now had a substantial fall risk and increased difficulty with walking. It soon became clear that Mary would not be able to return to the market, with all its physical demands. Thus in 2014 we sold all our remaining merchandise at our booth at the market in a highly successful liquidation sale conducted at our market booth. Thus ended 25 years of Mary’s Angels!

Although exiting the market reduced Mary’s art exposure, she was pleased to be represented by the Mariposa Gallery, a high quality, eclectic gallery in Nob Hill, owned by Liz Deneen. In 2017, when Mary was 80 years old, Mariposa Gallery gave Mary a one-person show. The opening was very well attended, and over the next few days Mary sold several major paintings. It was one of the most successful art openings the Gallery had ever had. Mary was ecstatic.

In the years after the final closure of our business, Mary and I stayed mostly at home, enjoying a very simple but comfortable life. I calculated that in our 19 years in New Mexico, Mary had created and sold 400 paintings. When the Covid pandemic hit in 2020, our lives did not change a great deal, except that our wonderful friends and neighbors shopped for us until the risk of Covid subsided. In 2022, Mary’s health began to decline substantially and after a serious fall in early 2023 she was hospitalized for a month, then placed in residential senior care in early May. On the afternoon of August 14, 2023, Mary passed away peacefully in my arms, at the age of 85.

Mary is survived by her wife of 49 years, Diana Rabenold, of Albuquerque; and by her brother John C. Austin of Williamsburg, Virginia. She was pre-deceased by her brothers Arthur I. Austin of Los Angeles, California and Dr. William H. Austin of Cape Elizabeth, Maine. She is also survived by her nephew Michael Austin of Santa Fe, New Mexico; great-niece Indigo of Santa Fe, New Mexico; her nephew Douglas Austin of Burlington, Virginia; her great-nephews Caleb and Samuel Austin of Richmond, Virginia; her great-great-nephew August C. Austin; nephew Mark Austin of Phoenix, Arizona; niece Jane Austin Steiman of Cedar Grove, New Jersey; and her great-niece Emily Steiman. Last but certainly not least, Mary is survived by her two cats, Misha and Luna.