Born in Jamestown, Rhode Island, Mary Perry Stone enrolled in art school at the age of 15 in 1923, attending both the Art Students League and the Traphagen School of Fashion and Design. In the 1930s, she began to work in the field of social-protest art and became one of forty women sculptors in the New York City Federal Arts Project, a significant cultural component of the Works Progress Administration. At this time, she also taught children the art of sculpturing and worked with the sculptor, Cesare Stea.

Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Stone exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Carnegie Hall, New York University, Rockefeller Center, the Roerich Museum, the New School for Social Research, Radio City, Independence Hall, and galleries such as the ACA Gallery and the Municipal Gallery in New York City.

After moving with her husband and daughter to the San Francisco Bay Area in the early 1950s, her work was displayed at art galleries such as Telegraph Hill, East West, Greta Willliams, the Artists Cooperative, and the Oakland Museum. Outraged at the Vietnam War, she held a solo show at Dominican College in San Rafael, California. Later, she would open her own gallery in San Rafael, California. In the 1970s and 1980s, Stone’s work was shown in Benicia, Sausalito, and at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, California. Stone moved to Ashland, Oregon in 1992. The Grants Pass Museum, the Rogue Valley Art Gallery, and the Art Space Gallery near Tillamook each exhibited her work. Her last show took place in February 2006 at the Thorndike Gallery on the campus of Southern Oregon University.

Today, Stone’s papers can be found at the Smithsonian, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and at Sonoma State University in their collections on women artists. She received awards for sculpture from both the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Oakland Museum.

Mary Perry Stone completed over 80 social protest murals during her lifetime. TAP

Artwork by Mary Perry Stone courtesy of the artist’s daughter, Ramie Streng.

Thanksgiving, Thank You Slaves by Mary Perry Stone / Oil / 1998