Mary Sterner Lawson

Mary Sterner Lawson has been making art since she was four, or at least that’s what her parents tell her. Knowing from a young age that she wanted to be an artist, Mary took two periods of art a day throughout high school to help her explore her passion. Though her profession became literature and she taught English for over three decades at Albany State University, her love for the arts, clay, and sculpture took off from those high school classes and translated into her many classes and workshops in ceramics and watercolor in the years and decades that followed. Since childhood, too, she has compulsively made the quick sketches of people and scenes for which she is known.  Lawson’s artwork is inspired by nature, landscapes, new places, people, situations, and experiences that touch her heart. One of her most recently completed pieces is a clay hand-built bas-relief of a nighttime experience. It depicts the scene at the back of the Whitney Museum, with people on a walkway looking out over the lively city of New York. Mary says, “it was so extraordinary to do something unusual” in creating this bas-relief.