MFA , Fine Art

MARY HEEBNER has been painting for most of her life. She was born in Los Angeles, California.  Heebner attended Providence High School and the College of Creative Studies at University of California at Santa Barbara, and received her MFA from UCSB in 1977.  She began exhibiting her collages and works on paper in galleries throughout the United States and abroad, including group and individual shows in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Washington DC, Seattle, Santiago Chile and Paris.  Her work is in numerous private and public collections including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The National Gallery of Art, UCLA Special Collections, John Paul Getty Museum, University of Chicago, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the GAP, the Berkus Collection. Skilled at the art of papermaking, Heebner incorporates papers, powdered pigments, and “anything that dissolves in water”  into her mixed media pieces, combining her interpretation of landforms and maps, or antiquities with the human form in order to create sensually abstract compositions. She is an avid traveler and her peripatetic lifestyle is a vital part of her creative process.Fascinated by the form and possibilities of the book as a means to interpret the many places she has traveled, Heebner began making fine art books in 1995. Island: Journal from Iceland and Scratching the Surface: A visit to Lascaux, Western Trilogy I and II, Full Lotus, Seeking the Open Heart and On the Blue Shore of Silence: Poems of the Sea by Pablo Neruda, and A Sacred Geography: Sonnets of the Himalaya and Tibet among them. These limited editions, often with her writing as well as original images are published under her imprint simplemente maria press. Heebner and her husband, photographer Macduff Everton, collaborate on assignments that have taken them to as far as Patagonia, and Tibet and as near as the California coastline and their Santa Barbara home. Heebner writes travel articles for several magazines including Condé Nast Traveler, Travel + Life and National Geographic Traveler. Western Horizon  (Abrams, 2000) with Everton’s photographs and sketches and essays by Heebner, was their first book together. In 2004 a version of Heebner’s  On the Blue Shore of Silence was published by Harper Collins/Rayo as a full color, fully bilingual hardcover book in commemoration of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda’s 100th birthday. English translations by Alastair Reid, and an afterword by Antonio Skármeta. Heebner’s collaboration with her daughter Sienna Craig, whose sonnets are printed on handmade pulp-painted paper in A Sacred Geography: Sonnets of the Himalaya and Tibet, will be featured in conjunction with the exhibit, “The Missing Peace: Artists Consider the Dalai Lama” at the Fowler Museum of Art, University of California at Los Angeles, in June 2006.She is currently working on a series of earth pigment paintings and drawings begun while exploring the sierras and fjords of Chilean Patagonia.Heebner’s paintings are represented by Edward Cella Art + Architecture and Sarah Lee Artworks + Projects. Her artist’s books are represented by Joshua Heller Rare Books and Vamp & Tramp booksellers.