Mary Heilmann, who achieved wide acclaim as an artist, never lived far from water. She was born in San Francisco, moved to El Segundo, Calif., just south of Los Angeles, when she was 7, and attended college in Santa Barbara and Berkeley.
Not long after moving to New York City in 1968 she visited the East End for the first time, at the invitation of Bruce Nauman, a fellow artist who was working at Roy Lichtenstein’s house in Southampton for the summer. She came here regularly in the years that followed, before buying her house in Bridgehampton in the mid-’90s.
She was a competitive diver as a teenager and loved body-surfing, although, as she told The Star, “I was never a board surfer. It was biased against girls back then; the boards were fat and heavy. No one would let you borrow one or show you how to do it.” Nonetheless, she felt the surfing scene was “really cool.”
“The one thing that is pan-coastal, all over the world, is the ocean,” she told The Star’s Jennifer Landes in 2020. It’s no wonder, then, that her first large-scale solo exhibition at an East End institution, held at Guild Hall last summer, was titled “Water Way.”
Mary Ann Heilmann, who was born on Jan. 3, 1940, in San Francisco to John Sherman Heilmann, a civil engineer, and the former Mary Florence Webb, a nurse, died on Aug. 14 at the Peconic Bay Medical Center in Riverhead, due to complications from a second fall, according to Liane Thatcher, her studio manager.
Considering the success she achieved as a painter for more than five decades, it comes as a surprise that she majored in English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, from which she earned a B.A. in 1962. However, after developing a fondness for ceramics there, she went on to study ceramics and sculpture at U.C. Berkeley, where she received a master’s degree in 1967.
From there, a year later, it was off to New York City, where, over the next few years, she fell in with a group of seriously emerging artists that included Gordon Matta-Clark, Keith Sonnier, Jackie Winsor, Liza Béar, and Richard Serra, whom she had known in high school.
While the road forward wasn’t always smooth, she got off to a quick start. At the end of the ‘60s she abandoned sculpture for painting, producing what she called in her 1999 memoir, “The All Night Movie,” a “materials-based sort of conceptual, anti-aesthetic, earth-colored, ironic painting that was often hard to look at.”
She was included in “Twenty-Six Contemporary Women Artists,” Lucy Lippard’s groundbreaking exhibition at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Conn. That 1971 show helped launch the careers of such artists as Alice Aycock, Mary Miss, Howardena Pindell, Adrian Piper, Winsor, and Barbara Zucker. Heilmann was also selected for the Whitney Museum’s 1972 Annual Exhibition, and went on to show at the influential Holly Solomon Gallery from 1976 to 1981.
She returned to San Francisco after Matta-Clark’s death in 1978 but came back to New York the following year. It wasn’t until 1986 that she secured representation with Pat Hearn, who had an important gallery on the Lower East Side. She has since been represented by Hauser & Wirth and Lisa Spellman’s 303 Gallery.
Heilmann’s many important exhibitions include “To Be Someone,” her first retrospective, at the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach, Calif. It traveled to the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, and the New Museum in New York City.
Others include “Looking at Pictures,” a major survey at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in 2016, “Painting Pictures” at Dia’s Dan Flavin Art Institute in Bridgehampton in 2017, a solo show at the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Torino, Italy, in 2024, and “Long Line,” a site-specific installation at the Whitney Museum in 2025.
Aside from painting, Heilmann began to make plywood chairs in 2002. Forty-five of her chairs, made from weatherproofed marine plywood and painted in many colors, were installed on an outdoor terrace of the Whitney’s new Meatpacking District location when it opened in 2015. She also created chairs of painted plywood with polypropylene webbing and wheels, several of which were included in her show “Water Way” at Guild Hall.
In 1992, Heilmann was a visiting artist at the California Institute of Arts in Valencia. One of the students at the time was Laura Owens, a painter whose accomplishments include a mid-career survey at the Whitney.
“I thought of her as a mentor, but then she quickly became a very good friend,” Owens said during a phone conversation from Los Angeles. “She’s deeply beloved by the people she taught. She had an incredible influence on so many people, whether they know it or not, because she brought this idea of abstraction having a connection to human emotions in such a deep and sincere way that was truly profound. I think she really opened the world up to a different way of looking at art.”
Rick Liss, an artist who lives in Amagansett and a close friend of Heilmann, said in an email, “Mary was a very special person and a great artist. She was kind, extremely positive, generous, and open. A pillar of the sober community as well as a leading abstractionist in the art world. A true trail blazer of our time.”
Heilmann’s work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Hammer Museum, the High Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Whitney Museum, among many others both domestic and international.
She is survived by her nieces, Ann Jaime and Chris Heilmann; her nephew, John Heilmann Jr., and their families. She was predeceased by her brother, John, and his wife, Linda.
