This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Oct. 10, 2013: Mary Sprague’s had a busy life. She gave birth to four children before finishing a master's degree, taught community college classes, made art, moved from California to St. Louis for her husband’s job, taught at Meramec, made more art, divorced, hosted legendary parties and made even more art.
At times, she’s felt like a rhinoceros, a particular one, one of several in her current exhibition at Duane Reed Gallery. This one straddles an uneven surface and broken pieces of stoneware in a sculpture called “Too Much on My Plate.”
At 79, Sprague now has more room on her own plate. But over the years, it’s groaned under extraordinary helpings of peak experiences that made people wonder, “How does she do it?” Looking back, she realizes you really can have everything you want -- but there’s a caveat.
“You can’t have it all at once,” Sprague said. “But if your health manages to be OK and you live long enough, there’s no reason you can’t have it all.”
Children and chickens
Sprague’s father’s U.S. Coast Guard career kept the family on the move, from Detroit to Massachusetts to Seattle then Cleveland. She played while her mother painted, and she and her sister drew portraits of each other at their mother’s instigation.
But art wasn’t a passion until much later. Sprague arrived at Stanford University with the intention of becoming a doctor but art classes won out over organic chemistry. She earned a bachelor’s in fine arts then a master’s in drawing and painting, all while juggling childcare with her husband, John, and friend Julie Monson.
Some years, Sprague and her husband alternated childcare and classes, hers on Monday, Wednesday and Friday and his on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Other years, Sprague attended one semester while Monson kept her kids, then they’d switch. Eventually, with seven babies, toddlers and elementary-school-age children between them, life was always a whirlwind, especially around their frequent trips to the local park.
“It was a challenge to make sure everyone had their shoes and socks and sweaters and got into the car,” Monson said. “And when you took them home, you had to make sure the shoes and socks went to the right house.”
Though feminism was on almost no one’s radar in the 1950s, Sprague felt deep down that it was wrong for all the art students to be female when the entire faculty was male. She also bucked against stated ideas that these female students would “just go home and have babies.”
“Yes, I wanted a family; and yes, I wanted to be an artist,” Sprague said. “I found myself getting kind of cranky.”
The feeling she later understood to be a reaction to sexism was channeled a half-century later into a series of cantankerous chickens on the go, many larger than the five-foot-tall artist.
“That would be what my chicken paintings were all about -- all those things that are and shouldn’t be,” Sprague said.
‘Mary at the center’
In 1968, after living and teaching in California for a decade and a half, Sprague’s political-scientist husband returned from a conference at Washington University in St. Louis with a startling announcement: He’d taken a job there.
“Most husbands at least pretend to ask their wives about things like where we’re moving but he didn’t get that,” Sprague said. “But he got it later, when I walked out the door.”
Even after her 1986 divorce, Sprague remained in St. Louis.“I came here kicking and screaming but St. Louis is home now,” Sprague said. Teaching at Meramec Community College, showing her work at local galleries and mingling with other artists cemented Sprague as a key figure in the local arts scene. Her loft at 510 N. Compton Ave., part of an artists’ cooperative, became the place to go when an exhibit opened, an out-of-town artist or curator flew in or creatives just wanted to drink and make merry, according to Central West End gallery owner Duane Reed, who’s known Sprague for 25 years.
Discussions, sporadic dancing and an occasional passed-out party-goer characterized these “Cheers” bar-type gatherings, which drew a “circus of characters.”
“There was always something happening there, with Mary at the center of it. She’s like Mother Earth,” Reed said. “Every quote-unquote art star would find their way to Mary’s.”
Artist Bob Cassilly was among those in Mary’s wider circle. In 1999, Cassilly had recently opened his ever-evolving Washington Avenue attraction. Sprague wondered if he would have a use for a friend’s stash of vibrantly colored tile salvaged from a downtown building and stored in Oklahoma. Cassilly said he could.
After three truckloads of the tile arrived at the City Museum loading dock, the hired drivers took off, stranding the stash, and Cassilly was able to negotiate purchasing the whole lot for $5,000 (“It was worth 10 times that,” Sprague said). In appreciation, Cassilly gave Sprague her pick of the tile, now displayed on her kitchen island countertop and floor. Sprague showed her own gratitude with a gift to her friend, the tile-supplier.
“She really liked my art, so I gave her a couple of big drawings and that really helped a lot because she got something,” Sprague said.
History and humor
Sprague’s pottery studio/living area now occupies an entire floor of the Compton Avenue loft, with her painting studio upstairs in a shared area. Her private floor was the creative space for her current exhibit, “A Little Wooden,” which also includes works in clay, such as the overcommitted rhinoceros, originally meant for a separate show.
The wood-based pieces are rich in both history and humor. Most components are part of Sprague’s personal narrative, including toys and other items from her own childhood, bookended by those of her mother and children. Hauling these beloved objects from California to Missouri, Sprague thought of them as a pack-rat collection, not art materials.
“But then it clicked in that it would be fun to make things out of it,” Sprague said. “You always wonder, ‘What would this look like with this?’ and they jump together.”
“Lather, Rinse and Repeat” is supported by chair legs from Stanford student housing, attached to a over-fired stoneware platter from Sprague’s teaching days at Meramec. Above that is a clay cage created by Sprague’s mother, a powder horn of her father’s and a cracked walnut platter that he made. In a wooden fruit bowl (“possibly from a yard sale”) sits a head adorned by a crowning glory: hundreds of shoe laces from a Union, Mo., flea market.
“There was a guy there selling shoelaces and he said, ‘How many do you need?’ and I said, ‘All of them,’” Sprague recalled.
Naming her works was nearly as much fun as creating them. “Lather, Rinse, Repeat” is a pop-culture reference to a random shower song by Phoebe of the TV show “Friends.” “Fish and Chips” depicts a scaled creature perched on poker chips and “My Level-Headed Horse” literally has a construction level for a head. But sensible doesn’t always mean stable, and the equine sculpture crashed once during the making and again after the opening reception (see video).
While her last two shows sold out, Sprague predicted that probably won’t be the case for this collection of oddities. “People don’t know what it is. It’s just too different,” Sprague said.
But that’s OK with her -- selling’s not the point. Having fun is.
As Sprague anticipates turning 80 in May, she thinks about taking her five grandchildren -- 12 to 15 years old and living from New York to LA -- to an Arkansas dude ranch. But the trip would only be a brief interruption to her days in the studio. Her next three-to-five-year project will likely return her to painting.
Work is better than any prescription or over-the-counter relief for the toe pain that’s become an almost constant companion. When she’s making art, the pain disappears and her world narrows to the canvas, the brush, the clay.
“My doctors said that’s what happens when you really focus,” Sprague said. “So I’ll probably keep working until they put me in the ground.”
