Mary Plaster, D.Min., M.A., is a multi-media artist, facilitator, and presenter, residing with her family since 2000 on Spirit Mountain near Duluth, Minnesota, USA, which overlooks the tip of scenic Lake Superior. Her designs are available for sale and she can be easily contacted for custom work in a variety of media.

Mary's latest project was designing & constructing 18 masks and costume pieces for the Minnesota Ballet's Carnival of the Animals. She has been creating and teaching across various genres and venues of studio and theater art for 30 years, earning degrees, grants, and world travel experiences on this path. In June 2010 she received a Doctorate in Ministry earned from Wisdom University in San Francisco. Her dissertation subject was masks and large puppets for art as meditation and sacred art activism.

Mary's knowledge of "cheap art" magic was initially gleaned years ago living south of the border, working with creative recycling, papier-mâché experts of central Mexico.
She received a 2008 McKnight/ARAC (Arrowhead Regional Arts Council) Individual Career Development Grant to attend the July apprentice program with Peter Schumann's 45-year-old Bread and Puppet Theater in Glover, Vermont. Immediately upon her return from the "Northeast Kingdom," she was a guest curator for the Duluth Art Institute (DAI), organizing an exhibit, Effigies of Peace and Protest: The Art of Social Activism, featuring four decades of selected historically significant street theater art. This 2008 pre-election show displayed Bread and Puppet Theater, the 35-year-old In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre (HoBT) of Minneapolis and local works. This art show inspired two All Souls Night (Dia de los Muertos) events in downtown Duluth.

Since events of 9-11, Mary has also extensively studied Earth-based wisdom, Creation Spirituality (CS) with post-modern theologian and author Matthew Fox, the Work That Reconnects (WTR) with Joanna Macy, Sacred Activism (ISA) with Andrew Harvey, and Magickal Activism with Starhawk. writing her dissertation on giant puppets and masks in ritual and celebration.

With her own Spirit Mountain Dancing Icons, Mary has focused on the organic nature of these larger-than-life paper entities, which call for inventive reuse of discarded materials, as well as a group process that encourages (gives heart to) collectives of actively engaged participants. Community art approaches stand in sharp contrast to mere entertainment of lone spectators in our television-bombarded culture! Many sets of hands have helped construct and embody her very biggest creations and she assists others in brainstorming to bring their ideas to visual fruition. In seasonal rituals, parades and celebrations Mary also volunteers the possibility of "stepping into" the role of a famous ancestor peacemaker or a personified energy for social justice. Her series features: Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, and more abstract archetypes of the "Green Man," "Gaia," and the "Black Madonna."

Mary and her original 3D designs have toured to several interfaith conferences across the Midwest and California Bay Area, and to the 2007 Burning Man Project in Nevada's Black Rock Desert. Her Gandhi entity appeared in the Twin Cities antiwar marches during the 2008 Republican National Convention. Mary was staff artist for HOBT's 2008 MayDay Parade in S. Minneapolis entitled, "A New Bridge, Infrastructure for the Future Beings," and she annually works for the St. Paul Ordway Center's ARTmoves Parade.

Fall 2010 Artistic Director
The Third Annual All Souls Night, November 1 & 2 at the Duluth Depot

Summer 2010
The Second Midwest Regional Collaborative for Sustainability Education
Artist, Storyteller, Elder: July 26-30 at the Conserve School near Land O' Lakes, Wisconsin

Creation Spirituality Gathering June 17-21 at Mercy Center w/ Rev. Matthew Fox, Ph.D.

Spring 2010
ARTmoves Parade as part of the Flint Hills International Children's Festival
Residency with Hancock Rec Center, Ordway parade unit in the June 5th procession around Rice Park, St. Paul, Minnesota

Minnesota Ballet Carnival of the Animals Maskmaker March 21st at the Duluth Entertainment and Convention Center (DECC)

Winter 2010
Martin Luther King, Jr. Weekend events with giant puppets

Water Works: Artistic Expressions Concerning Water,  "The Face of Gaia" 
group art show at the Duluth Aquarium

Fall  2009
2nd Annual All Souls Night, November 6th at the Duluth Depot

Gathering Gratitude, harvest display, Minneapolis Hennepin Ave. UMC, Sacred Journey

Spring 2009

ARTmoves Parade worked with Scheffer recreation center in St. Paul, creating for the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts' Flint Hills International Children's Festival, May

A Council of All Beings, Deep ecology classes, adults developed masks/costumes for discussion about Earth's future, Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Duluth, March

Rosa Parks Lives! Celebration of National Women's History Month, Rosa sightings/ contest on the city buses, she (again) refused to give up her seat! Duluth YWCA, March