Earth Air and Sea on the Great Highway

Mary Fuller McChesney, a California sculptor, has been carving “giant totems and goddesses” for nearly 50 years. Her artwork embodies numerous sources – Native American, Pre-Columbian, African, ancient matriarchal cultures – and like the sacred totems of the Pacific Northwest coastal tribes, honors her ancestral ties to family, both animal and human. Her art is shared and openly accessible, as public commissions have ensured that it is visible to a wide audience.

Earth – Air – Sea is sited in close proximity to the ocean and the San Francisco Zoo, and like many of Fuller’s works,the animal figures (in this case a lion, bird, and fish) were chosen to relate to their environment and engage a broad audience.

Born in 1922, Fuller has lived in California all but the first two years of her life. She studied philosophy at Berkeley, and discovered she loved to work with metal and stone while welding in a Richmond, California shipyard during World War II. In 1949 she married Robert McChesney, and much of her writing, including the book A Period of Exploration: San Francisco 1945-1950 (which has been called “one of the key documentary works in the field of modern California art history”) has been published under the Mary Fuller McChesney name.

An ardent feminist who makes art that is consciously “anti-patriarchal,” Fuller found that in the 1950’s, women artists, as well as west coast artists, were not taken seriously. More recently she has said that “women artists [. . .] are often viewed as eccentrics, or perhaps merely quaint, or worse, plain uninteresting, depending upon husbands to support them, and painting privately for themselves.”

Earth Air Sea was commissioned by the San Francisco Arts Commission for the San Francisco Clean Water Program.