About the Artist
Artist Statement
I believe in the magical power of the creative process, the creative art flux that can bring diverse people together to work and learn from each other and nature. It is the power that can bring forth the best in each individual through looking and seeing anew, that can bring forth new visions and new ways of dealing sanely with critical environmental and social problems facing us. Art making brings forth curiosity, collaboration, hope, humor, appreciation, affection, some of my favorite states of being.
At this time in my life and career as an artist, I am most interested in the intersection of art making, natural sciences, environmental perception, arts education, activism and peace making. I know the abilities and characteristics of glass well, as a material with polarities and dichotomies: interior edges, reflections, transparency, magnification, brittle and molten, sharp and dull, smooth and rough, opaque and clear, rapid transformation to many forms. SiO2 has served me well as one of my main mediums to address the confluence of environmental issues, art and science.
Biography
Mary Bayard White, Bay Area sculptor, mixed disciplines artist/educator, works in the realms of environmental and social justice, social practice, community arts, and place making. Her work is often collaborative and interdisciplinary. Each project is different.
Mary grew up in Haverford, Pennsylvania, the South Side of Chicago, Iowa corn fields, Indiana hills, Colorado Rocky mountains and England, as a daughter of a water resources geographer and a labor activist. She was drawn to the colors, matter and motion of each place. Her early travels seeded a passion for the creative process, nature, and caring for the earth’s creatures and natural resources. At 20, after working as a potter in London, and a waitress for Andy Warhol at Max’s Kansas City in NYC, she transferred to California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, CA to study ceramics with Viola Frey. She spent two semesters at the CCAC experimental program at El Molino, Erongaricuaro, Michoacan, Mexico studying traditional Michoacan ceramic techniques. She started taking glass classes in 1968 at the newly formed CCAC Glass Program, studying with Ruth Tamura and Marvin Lipofsky.
In 1970 Mary earned a BFA in Spatial Arts: Ceramics, at California College of the Arts (formerly, California College of Arts & Crafts) in Oakland, and a Secondary Teaching Credential in Art with a Minor in English, teaching documentary photography as a student teacher. She took a part time job teaching publicity, screen printing, graphic design and drawing at Oakland High School 1973-1979, and worked with glass in the afternoons, evenings and weekends.
Following graduation she helped build and blew in a hot glass studio off Gilman in Berkeley with Randy Strong, Michael Cohn and Alan Rice. In 1974 she rented a studio in the west Berkeley Dream Factory, establishing one of the first hot glass studios in the Bay Area constructed and run by a woman. She applied for her business license using her Mexican name, Maria Blanca Glass, which later became Blanca Glass and later Mary White Design. During the 1970s she was a member of BASAG Bay Area Studio Art Glass. Every member ran a hot glass studio and paid their own gas bills.
In 1978 her studio building was sold and she rented a studio in Emeryville, building another hot glass studio with a central vent hood shared with Michael Cohn’s furnace and studio on the other side of the hood. She made and sold many functional forms at sales and galleries, including water tumblers to commemorate the Clean Water Act and the precious nature of portable water.
She decided to attend grad school in 1979 and joined the CCAC MFA program in glass with Marvin Lipofsky 1980-82 to find ways to bring more imagery and content into her work. She experimented with traditional glass painting, reverse glass paint and overlay carving. Throughout grad school she taught Glass 1 at CCAC and continued running her private hot glass studio to financially support herself.
After grad school 1982-85 Mary continued working in her hot glass studio. Before she started the MFA, she formed a collaboration with Janet Silva, Blanca/Silva Glass, to make big slumped plates and lamps and exhibited them at local and national craft fairs and galleries. In addition she contracted with the Nature Company to sandblast vases and bowls with nature related images for their stores and catalog, making as many as 500 a month. The poppy bowls and bowls were the most popular.
When the Emeryville studio building was sold around 1984 Mary moved her studio to West Oakland Prieto Studios and shifted her emphasis away from running another hot glass furnace. She brought her kilns and sandblaster, deciding to concentrate more on sandblasting, reverse glass painting, overlays and casting and fusing with recycled window glass.
She was invited to a two month Artist Residency at Phantom Canyon Ranch near Livermore, Colorado in 1986 to document the fauna and flora with reverse glass painting and acrylic paintings. The work was exhibited the following year in conjunction with the Nature Conservancy, who later purchased a part of the land.
While at the ranch, she received a call from the SJSU School of Art and Design Chair that shifted her world. After the sudden death of Dr. Robert Fritz, founder and head of the San Jose State University Glass, Mary was selected to join the SJSU Art faculty and take over Dr. Fritz’s position. Mary completed the residency and drove back from the Rocky Mountains to start her new job in San Jose. She taught for nineteen years at San Jose State University, serving as instructor, facilitator, equipment builder for the Glass Area, and hosting many national and international artists. She created, fund-raised for, and organized numerous outreach projects during her tenure, including two California Glass Exchanges. She served as site co-chair of the 1995 Oakland Glass Art Society meeting in Oakland and hosted a workshop at SJSU for women glass artists right after GAS. The last big event she organized at SJSU, a year before she retired in 2005, was a symposium and alumni gathering for 40 years of SJSU Glass with guest artists Fritz Driesbach and Erwin Eisch. SJSU glass, started in 1964 and is now the oldest higher education art glass program in California.
Mary had continued to maintain her own glass studio throughout her years of teaching. In the midst of teaching at SJSU, Mary moved her studio in west Oakland to her new glass studio to west Berkeley in 1995, purchasing a 1884 Victorian with her partner Jerry Sears, lifting and rehabbing it to provide living space upstairs and glass studio and wood studios below. Her Dwelling Series was inspired by camping out for a year in the bare bones of the lifted house while they did the upgrade. Mary taught 2D design and teaching perspective drawing that inspired her to make several series of Seeking a Perspective reverse glass paintings
In the new studio, she installed a solar panel feed back system for her glass kilns. Her lifelong interest in environmental issues led her also to become increasingly involved with the Women Eco Artists Dialog weadartists.org WEAD, an online artists directory, archive and magazine. She joined the Board in 1998 and became the Board Chair in 2020.
From 2002-2012 she served as co-Chair of the Crucible Glass program in Oakland and helped create the hot glass studio and curriculum. She organized a significant donation of artist Joan Reep’s hot glass studio equipment, tools, color, bricks and furnace blowers from Boulder, CO which served as the first core equipment of the Crucible hot Glass program.
After “rewiring” from SJSU, Mary took a leave from the Crucible and moved to Colorado to care for her 93 year old father. After he died in 2006, she lead a collaboration with 16 scientists, artists, engineers, city officials and ecologists to design, permit, fundraise and build a 18 foot high flood level marker with flood education signage in the high-risk downtown floodplain of Boulder, CO. The project was in honor of her father, who since 1955 had urged the City not to build in the floodplain. The flood marker was installed and officially given to the City of Boulder in 2011.
Mary returned to the Bay Area in 2006, continued teaching at the Crucible and organized/fundraised for a three day symposium and exhibition “50 years of Glass” at the Crucible in 2012. She shifted her glass focus to an ecological lens, prioritized using reused materials and focused on the glass houses and reverse painting using crates of used glass window frames glass artist John Lewis gifted her.
As a Fulbright Scholar at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, Ireland 2009-2010, Mary partnered with Carolyn Madden of NCAD, graduate art/design students and Irish Craft Council cohorts to produce a two-semester seminar course: The Landscape of Craft and Design and a symposium Craft in Context, focusing on craft as a vehicle for social justice.
Returning from Ireland, Mary continued teaching at the Crucible, researching “sustainable practices” with glass making and developing clay/glass sculptural pieces. She took classes in Eco Art and worked more with WEAD. From 2013-2015 Mary worked on social practice projects and taught classes at St. Mary’s College, working with students to make environmental art in their permaculture garden including glass mosaic structures. In 2015, she helped the Ghost Ranch Retreat Center in Abiquiu, New Mexico, redesign a new glass studio after a devastating flood, and taught stained glass workshops there for several years.
She curated an exhibition “Sparks” at San Jose City College Gallery in conjunction with the GAS San Jose in 2015, with support from ACGA. The exhibit included work representing all of the glass higher education programs in CA and a large timeline of the history of art glass in CA.
In 2016 she was selected for the The Birthplace of the Silicon Valley project with collaborator Vickie Jo Sowell. They proposed and constructed three 18 ft. high outdoor metal/glass sculptures in the form of historic diodes and transistors. This visually and historically significant artwork in the public realm was installed on the site of the historic Shockley Lab on San Antonio Road in Mountain View in 2018.
Expanding her interest in supporting “artivism” and arts engagement for youth, she partnered with Akataka tribal youth and elders in Grand Bayou, Louisiana in 2016-2019, to design and build six stained glass panels and one large tryptic for their new church after their original church was destroyed by the Katrina storm.
In 2021-22 Mary received a Berkeley Civic Arts Grant and was fortunate to work with unhoused young artists at Youth Spirit Artworks. Youthspiritartworks.org
In 2024 Mary participated as one of eight international Visiting Artists for a two week Southern African Glass Safari at TUT, Tswana University of Technology Glass Program in Pretoria, South Africa and Ngwenga Glass in Eswatini. Ngwenga hosted the students and visiting artists for an amazing week working with entirely recycled hot glass melted from recycled bottles. At the end of the residency each visiting artist worked with a small group of TUT glass students and created an exhibition. Mary led the screen printing and fusing window glass section. A new organization of glass makers in Africa was formed after the first Glass Safari. MOYA
Inspired by the Glass Safari, in 2025 Mary and Katrina Hude, also a Glass Safari artist, organized a 20 day USA West Coast Residency for two TUT students. They spent 10 days with Mary exploring the Bay Area glass community and 10 days on Whidbey Island blowing glass in Katrina’s studio.
Mary currently serves as WEAD Board Chair WEADartists.org, focusing on helping raise female identified unheard voices through exhibitions, online and in person events and creating art residency opportunities related to Eco Art. She is working on an upcoming exhibition of sculptural bird baths and glass birds.
Click to view or download Mary Bayard White’s resume.