Mary Fuller (sculptor)

Fuller died at an assisted living facility in Petaluma, California on May 4, 2022, at the age of 99.

She married Robert McChesney in December 1949; they lived in the North Bay San Francisco. They moved to Sonoma Mountain in Sonoma County near Petaluma, California in 1952, after living in Mexico for a year, and lived and worked there through Robert McChesney's death in 2008, after which Mary remained there, continuing to work, until the late 2010s. During their time in Guadalajara, Mexico, she began writing seriously, publishing a story in "New Story," and embarking upon writing mystery novels, publishing her first in 1953. She also began writing articles for Art Digest, then for Artforum.

Mary Fuller McChesney (October 20, 1922 – May 4, 2022) was an American sculptor and art historian. She was a 1975 National Endowment for the Arts fellow.

McChesney was born to Robert Fuller and Karen Rasmussen on October 20, 1922, in Wichita, Kansas and grew up in Stockton, California after moving there at age two with her family. She attended the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied philosophy with Paul Marhenke. Leaving before graduating, she became a welder in the Richmond, California shipyard, during World War II, and potter at California Faience, starting a ceramics business of her own, along with her partner Avrum "Bill" Rubenstein: Two Fish Pottery. She held her first solo art show, of paintings and clay sculptures, Artists’ Guild Gallery (an artists’ co-op) in San Francisco. Through her association with The Artists' Guild Gallery, she became acquainted with a wide variety of her contemporary artists, including Hassel Smith, Ed Corbett, Emmy Lou Packard, Robert P. McChesney, George Goya, John Hultbert, Clyfford Still, and Ad Reinhardt.