Mary Plaster, M.A., is a self employed multi-media artist, facilitator, presenter and writer, residing with her family since 2000 on Spirit Mountain overlooking Duluth, Minnesota. She has been creating and teaching across various genres and venues of studio and theater art for over 25 years, earning degrees in both disciplines while accumulating global experiences traveling in Mexico, South America, India, and France.
Her businesses are called Painterly Gestures and Spirit Mountain Dancing Icons.
Mary was inspired by the early works of In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre (HOBT) as a teenager visiting Minneapolis in the late 1970s. Her theatrical puppets, masks, costumes, props and scenic internship began there in the early 1980s with internationally renowned Children's Theatre Company & School. Most of her cheap art magic was knowledge gleaned while living south of the border in the mid-1980s and working with creative recycling and papier-mâché experts with Teatro Libre of Leon, Guanajuato. She has since worked backstage with several companies in addition to occasional informal street performance in parades and ceremonies.
Mary's formal graduate arts study concentrated in mixed media painting. She also studied Byzantine style icon writing independently with artist Sr. Mary Charles McGough OSB (1925-2007) of St. Scholastica Monastery and advanced egg tempera with the Russian Andreyev family's Prosopon School of Iconology during their visits to the Twin Cities.
Her former folk art passions were rekindled by doing art activism for peace, social justice and sustainability working in progressive area churches and the parks & rec. system. After events of 9-11 Mary joined efforts with The Art of Peace, a large, annual community arts event for five years. Her 2006 UWS Masters thesis art show featured both traditional icons and the larger-than-life "Dancing Icons," an inspiring, animated series of wearable likenesses of ancestor peacemakers such as Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, and abstract archetypes of the "Green Man" and "Black Madonna."
Mary is currently a doctoral candidate in Earth-based spirituality studies at Wisdom University, researching her dissertation on icons, puppets and masks in ritual and celebration. She finds the folk art nature of giant entities appealing because of the inventive reuse of materials and a process that encourages (gives heart to) collectives of active, thinking participants, rather than merely entertaining lone spectators in our television-bombarded culture. Many hands have helped construct and perform with her large creations and she facilitates others' brainstorming to bring their visual ideas to fruition.
Mary has published an article, Mary and the Green Man, relating her puppetry experiences in a new book celebrating the postmodern theologian Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox, Originally Blessed. http://www.originallyblessed.org/
In parades and other events Mary offers volunteers the possibility of stepping into the role of a famous spokesperson or a personified energy for social justice. She and her original designs have traveled to several conferences across the Midwest, California Bay Area and the 2007 Burning Man Project in Nevada's Black Rock Desert. For her local work she received a 2008 McKnight/ARAC (Arrowhead Regional Arts Council) Individual Career Development Grant towards the fee/expenses to participate in the July Apprentice program with Peter Schumann's Bread and Puppet Theater in Glover, VT.
Spring of 2008 Mary was a staff artist for HOBT's MayDay Parade in S. Minneapolis as well as the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts' Flint Hills International Children's Festival ARTmoves Parade in St. Paul. She also participated with large visuals in the Twin Cities antiwar marches during the September Republican National Convention.
Activities Fall 2008
Immediately upon her return from Bread and Puppet's summer program in the "Northeast Kingdom," Mary was guest curator for the Duluth Art Institute (DAI), organizing an exhibit, Effigies of Peace and Protest: The Art of Activism, featuring four decades of giant masks and puppets. The art show runs August 14th-November 4th and displays HOBT, Bread and Puppet and locally made pieces. An artist dialogue invites the HOBT artistic director, Sandy Spieler, who greatly influenced Mary's life and art directions mixing art with spirituality and politics.
Mary is preparing a new puppet for Lake Superior Community College (LSC). It will be assembled with help of students attending
the statewide Community and Technical Colleges Fine Art Conference: Art in the Heart of Community. This entity will march
in the "All Souls Night" celebration at the Duluth Art Institute and then be on display at LSC.
Later in October she will speak on community ritual and visuals at the College of Saint Scholastica's conference: Spirituality of Work. Her talk is entitled: Work of the People: Postmodern Ceremony and Celebration
http://www.css.edu:80/About_St_Scholastica/Lectures_and_Arts/Spirituality_and_Work/Speakers.html
There are additional community art building events planned with the DAI puppet art display, which will culminate in a local evening "All Souls" procession and celebration with lanterns, costumes and large puppets after 6:00 p.m. on November 1st in and around the Depot Great Hall. http://duluthartinstitute.org/
Soon afterwards Mary and her puppets will venture to Louisville's Center for Interfaith Relations, celebrating the Festival of Faiths: Coming of Age November 9th-16th
http://www.interfaithrelations.org/Home.aspx
For more information:
www.maryplaster.com
maryplaster@aol.com
