Mary Heebner | |
|---|---|
 Heebner in 2019. | |
| Born | April 19, 1951 Burbank, California, United States |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | University of California, Santa Barbara (B.A. 1981, M.F.A. 1977) |
| Occupation(s) | Artist and author |
| Spouses | |
| Children | 1 |
| Website | maryheebner |
Mary Doretta Heebner (born April 19, 1951) is an American artist and author.
Heebner was born on April 19, 1951, in Burbank, California, to Claire Lucille Menei and Walter Schussler Heebner. [1] [2] Her father, Walter, was a professional musician, composer, and songwriter, then as an executive at RCA Records and Capitol Records. [1] Mary Heebner attended Providence High School during which she was a part-time studio assistant to Corita Kent at Immaculate Heart High School. [3] [4] Heebner credits Kent as an influence in her career and Heebner would also make occasional contact with Daniel Berrigan while at Immaculate Heart. [3] [4]
She attended the University of California, Santa Barbara's College of Creative Studies and graduated with a B.A. in 1973. [5] [6] She also received her M.F.A. from UC Santa Barbara in 1977, [6] [7] working with mentor William Dole. [8]
Heebner's work has been in both private and public collections including: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Library of Congress, the British Library, the New York Public Library, Stanford University, Dartmouth College, Columbia University, University of Chicago, University of Michigan, Indiana University, and Santa Barbara Museum of Art. [9] [10] [11]
She founded Simplemente Maria Press in 1995, which produces limited edition artist's books that combine her paintings and writing. [10] [12] Heebner has collaborated with writers for several artists books including a book based on Hamlet by William Shakespeare, Pablo Neruda, Sienna Craig, Michael Hannon, Stephen Kessler and Clayton Eshleman. [13] HarperCollins published trade editions of two of Heebner's artist's books that paired her paintings with the poems of Pablo Neruda, which featured translations by Scottish writer Alastair Reid, printed in honor of the poet's 100th birthday. [14] [15] [16] The first book, On the Blue Shore of Silence, was followed in 2008 by a companion volume, Intimacies. [14] [15] [16]
Heebner has an abiding interest in antiquity. In 1995 she wrote and illustrated a monograph, Old Marks, New Marks, [17] with an essay by Carolyn Radlo, linking her practice to ancient mark making. In 1997, the French minister of culture invited her to visit the Lascaux cave, which has been closed to the public since 1963. This inspired a series of paintings and an artist's book, Scratching the Surface: a visit to Lascaux and Rouffignac, which prompted an invitation to revisit Lascaux. A visit to Angkor and Ayutthaya led to large installation pieces ("Bodhisattvas at Ayutthaya" [18] [19] and "Ancient Presences" [20] and three artist books (Full Lotus, Bayon: Sketches from Bayon Temple, Angkor Thom, [21] and Silent Faces/Angkor [22] ) and the series Geography of A Face: Khymer. [23] Repeated visits to Patagonia in Chile resulted in a book, a series of paintings, and an artist book Unearthed. [24] [25] Intimacy: Drawing with Light, Drawn from Stone, an exploration of the drawing process using watermarks, original text and images based on Classical Roman sculptures. [26] Cassandra is a hand painted accordion fold book referencing Greek myth, and poetry by Stephen Kessler. [27] Arctic Trilogy, original text and images based on expeditions to the Arctic in 2017 and 2024. [28]
Other publications include: Bridging Image and Word: 25 Years of Artists Books, 1995-2020. [29] The Venus Paintings (Edward Cella Art+Architecture, 2013). [30] Patagonia: La Ultima Esperanza, (Tixcacalulpul Press, 2011) by Heebner and Macduff Everton. [31] Intimacies/Intimismos: Poems of Love by Pablo Neruda, translated by Alastair Reid (Harper Collins/Rayo, 2008). [32] On the Blue Shore of Silence: Poems of the Sea by Pablo Neruda, translated by Alastair Reid, commentary by Antonio Skármeta (Harper Collins/Rayo, 2004). [33] The Western Horizon, Heebner/Everton (Abrams, 2000). [34]
Heebner's interest in Classical sculpture influenced a series of large paintings including the Venus Paintings, exhibited in 2013, of which Dr. Bruce Robertson has written, "Heebner had miraculously rescued these sculptures from the museums she has seen them in and returned them to the world they came from, a world of change, accident, thick encrustations and vaporous atmosphere." [35]
Heebner resides in Santa Barbara, California, with photographer and husband Macduff Everton, whom she married in 1989 and shares a stepson. [3] [9] [36]
She had previously married Steven E. Craig on March 11, 1972. [6] [37] Craig, her first husband, Heebner met while in high school working together at Universal Studios Hollywood. [4] They were married for 13 years and share a daughter. [2] [6] [38]
Lascaux is a network of caves near the village of Montignac, in the department of Dordogne in southwestern France. Over 600 parietal wall paintings cover the interior walls and ceilings of the cave. The paintings represent primarily large animals, typical local contemporary fauna that correspond with the fossil record of the Upper Paleolithic in the area. They are the combined effort of many generations. With continued debate, the age of the paintings is now usually estimated at around 17,000 - 22,000 years. Because of the outstanding prehistoric art in the cave, Lascaux was inducted into the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1979, as an element of the Prehistoric Sites and Decorated Caves of the Vézère Valley.
Il Postino: The Postman is a 1994 comedy-drama film co-written by and starring Massimo Troisi and directed by English filmmaker Michael Radford. Based on the 1985 novel Ardiente paciencia by Antonio Skármeta, itself adapted from a 1983 film written and directed by Skármeta, the film tells a fictional story in which the real life Chilean poet Pablo Neruda forms a friendship with a simple Procida postman (Troisi) who learns to love poetry. The cast includes Troisi, Philippe Noiret, and Maria Grazia Cucinotta. The screenplay was adapted by Radford, Troisi, Anna Pavignano, Furio Scarpelli, and Giacomo Scarpelli.
The College of Creative Studies (CCS) is the smallest of the three undergraduate colleges at the University of California, Santa Barbara, unique within the University of California system in terms of structure and philosophy. Its small size, student privileges, and grading system are designed to encourage self-motivated students with strong interests in a field to accomplish original work as undergraduates. A former student has called it a “graduate school for undergraduates”. The college has roughly 350 students in nine majors and approximately 60 professors and lecturers. There is an additional application process to the standard UC Santa Barbara admission for prospective CCS students, and CCS accepts applications for admissions throughout the year.
Naomi Shihab Nye is an Arab American poet, editor, songwriter, and novelist. Born to a Palestinian father and an American mother, she began composing her first poetry at the age of six. In total, she has published or contributed to over 30 volumes of poetry. Her works include poetry, young-adult fiction, picture books, and novels. Nye received the 2013 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children's Literature in honor of her entire body of work as a writer, and in 2019 the Poetry Foundation designated her the Young People's Poet Laureate for the 2019–21 term.
Clayton Eshleman was an American poet, translator, and editor, noted in particular for his translations of César Vallejo and his studies of cave painting and the Paleolithic imagination. Eshleman's work has been awarded with the National Book Award for Translation, the Landon Translation prize from the Academy of American Poets (twice), a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Rockefeller Study Center residency in Bellagio, Italy, among other awards and honors.
The Santa Barbara Museum of Art (SBMA) is an art museum located in downtown Santa Barbara, California.
Forrest Gander is an American poet, translator, essayist, and novelist. The A.K. Seaver Professor Emeritus of Literary Arts & Comparative Literature at Brown University, Gander won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2019 for Be With and is chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Nathaniel Tarn was a French-American poet, essayist, anthropologist, and translator. He was born Edward Michael Mendelson in Paris to a French-Romanian mother and a British-Lithuanian father. He lived in Paris, France, until the age of seven, then in Belgium until the age of 11; when World War II began, the family moved to England. He emigrated to the United States in 1970 and taught at several American universities, primarily Rutgers, where he was a professor from 1972 until 1985. He has lived outside Santa Fe, New Mexico, since his retirement from Rutgers.
James Alexander Clendenen was an American winemaker and the owner of Au Bon Climat, a winery in Santa Maria, California. Jim Clendenen was deemed "The Godfather" of Santa Barbara County wine. He was key in raising international recognition of Santa Barbara County as a world class wine region, as well as being instrumental in raising the quality of Burgundian varietals on California's Central Coast.
Pablo Neruda was a Chilean poet-diplomat and politician who won the 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature. Neruda became known as a poet when he was 13 years old and wrote in a variety of styles, including surrealist poems, historical epics, political manifestos, a prose autobiography, and passionate love poems such as the ones in his collection Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924).
Jack Zajac is a Californian West Coast artist who has been concerned with the “Romantic Surrealist tradition”.
Linda Vallejo is an American artist known for painting, sculpture and ceramics. Her work often addresses her Mexican-American ethnic identity within the context of American art and popular culture. The founder of the commercial art gallery Galería Las Américas, she is also an arts educator and has been involved intraditional Native American and Mexican rituals and ceremonies for many years.
Ellen Bass is an American poet and author. She has won three Pushcart Prizes and a Lambda Literary Award for her 2002 book Mules of Love. She co-authored the 1991 child sexual abuse book The Courage to Heal. She received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2014 and was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2017. Bass has taught poetry at Pacific University and founded poetry programs for prison inmates.
Macduff Everton is an American photographer, known for his work with the Maya primarily on the Yucatán Peninsula.
The Pablo Neruda Order of Artistic and Cultural Merit was created in 2004 by the National Council of Culture and the Arts of the government of Chile, as part of the commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda.
Mónica Brown is an American academic and author of children's literature. Known for her Lola Levine and Sarai chapter book series, as well as numerous biographies covering such Latin American luminaries as Tito Puente, Celia Cruz, Dolores Huerta, and Cesar Chavez, she writes relatable characters that highlight the nuance and diversity of the Latinx experience and girl empowerment. Her motivation is to show that bicultural children are not made up of cultural fractions but whole people with a rich and vibrant cultural heritage, such as her character the bicultural red-headed Peruvian-Scottish-American Marisol McDonald. Brown is also an English professor at Northern Arizona University.
Ruth Tunstall Grant (1945–2017) was an African American artist, educator and activist in the San Francisco Bay Area known for her paintings, community activism, and arts advocacy. Her work has been featured in many invitational group exhibitions as well as solo shows at national and international venues such as Dallas Museum of Fine Art, Dallas, Texas; Rath Museum, Geneva, Switzerland; Triton Museum of Art, Santa Clara, California; San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, California; and Los Gatos Museum of Art, Los Gatos, California. She had a strong focus on community service and advocacy of children’s rights and social justice in and beyond Santa Clara County. She established many innovative, ongoing arts programs and inspired creative activists, such as Marita Dingus.
Lindsey Ross is an American fine-art photographer based in Santa Barbara, California, known for creating artwork using the time-intensive wet-plate collodion photographic process. Ross is known for creating ultra large format 32-by-24-inch images on metal (tintypes) and glass (ambrotypes) using one of three Chamonix view cameras that size in existence, keeping alive the collodion method invented in the 1850s.
William Dole (1917-1983) was an American collagist and teacher.
Nina de Creeft Ward is an American artist who works with bronze, soft sculptures, etchings, woodcuts, and monoprints. She had multiple art exhibitions in the Philippines and the United States. Ward was the co-winner of the Individual Artists Award for Works in Clay in 2006 from the Santa Barbara Arts Fund. Most of Ward's work has to do with animals, including a 1998 exhibition of art that resembled endangered and extinct species. She has taught students such as at the University of Northern Iowa. Her clay animal models are made with raku ware.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Artists | |
| Other | |
