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Mary Holmes (May 8, 1910 - January 21, 2001) was an artist and art history professor. She believed that “the whole function of art is to make visible what is invisible” and dedicated her life to that pursuit. Her work integrates Greek mythology, Jungian themes, biblical figures, tarot imagery, and literary references. She taught at the University of Iowa, Ohio State University, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Raised by a “Montessori mother,” Holmes rebelled against many of the expectations of her day. She divorced her husband in 1940 and never remarried, choosing to pursue a career in teaching while living on a series of unusual properties including her castle in Agoura, California and her hilltop property in Santa Cruz, California. She rejected modern abstraction in art, favoring instead a more traditional approach which featured figures and narrative. In universities dominated by male professors and administrators, she stood out for delivering bold and expressive lectures. She built such a strong reputation as a lecturer that she was invited to teach some of the first televised university courses.

Early Life
Mary Holmes was born on May 8, 1910 in Aberdeen, South Dakota to John Horace Holmes and Marie Heloise Adams. Her sister, Sara Holmes Boutelle, was a year older and the two women remained close throughout their lives.

In 1914, the family moved to Chicago where Mary attended one of the first Montessori schools in the United States. Dr. Maria Montessori had recently sparked international interest in the “Montessori Method” when her unusual grade school for inner-city students in Italy proved effective in 1906, and had just done a speaking tour across the U.S. in 1913. In contrast with traditional lecture-based teaching, the “Montessori Method '' involves hands-on, student-student driven learning with different age groups sharing the classroom. Thanks to this academic freedom in her elementary years, Holmes chose to focus on drawing and painting until, when she was eight, her teachers finally urged her to learn to read.

Her newfound reading abilities did not hinder her interest in art. She remembers, “I had great success in the fourth grade, when, since I’m extremely nearsighted, the flower I painted came out looking like an impressionistic picture, which it was, because I really couldn’t see any details." She later transferred to Miss Haire’s School for Girls and studied there until her parents moved to Muscleshell, Montana at which point she went to Hannah Moore Academy, a boarding school near Baltimore, Maryland.

Career
After graduating from Hannah Moore Academy in 1927, Holmes went to Hollins College where she earned an undergraduate degree in philosophy. She said “I deliberately chose a school that would have nothing to do with art. It had no art history, it had no studio studio art. I chose it because of that, because it might affect my mind and I didn’t want that." After graduating from Hollins in 1931, she spent a year in Europe with her sister, Sara Boutelle. There she took classes at the University of Berlin & Academie Collorossi in Paris.

When Holmes returned to the United States, she enrolled in Johns Hopkins University to study with Max Brödel, a pioneer in medical painting. where they spent six weeks drawing one bone. She later remarked that, “I’d thought we were done the first day but we just kept looking, and it was invaluable. I wouldn’t trade anything for it." Although the experience impacted her work, she did not complete the program because it was “too bloody and painful.”

In 1935, Holmes and her friend, Barbara Betz, took over a former speakeasy and Chinese restaurant in Madison, Wisconsin and returned it to its original Victorian charm. There, they opened a student boarding house and art salon. On June 15, 1936, Holmes married Gerald O’Malley who was involved in the Madison real estate business. She left him a year later and went to stay with her sister in New York City where her son, Michael O’Malley, was born in October 1937. Later, Holmes noted that “If it hadn’t been for my divorce, I would probably still be a philosophical housewife, so I suppose that was the turning point in my career." As a single mother requiring an income, Holmes turned to teaching.

After a year as a teacher at her alma mater, Hannah Moore Academy, she enrolled at the University of Iowa where she earned a double masters degree in painting and art history. There she became close with art professors Emil Ganso and Philip Guston and, after completing the masters program, she joined the faculty to lecture in art history. When the U.S. entered World War II in 1941, several professors at the University of Iowa were drafted, offering Holmes the opportunity to take over part-way through the semester. She credits this experience with compelling her to acquire a depth and breadth of material that she would not have otherwise sought. She believes that this prevented specialization and improved her abilities as a lecturer.

From 1947 to 1953 Holmes taught art history at Ohio State University, Columbus, and one of the first educational television programs on the local Columbus station. For the same station she hosted late-night movies dressed as “Vampira." When she went on to teach at UCLA, in 1953, she continued her career in television with a full for-credit course on the local Los Angeles station which enrolled 1,058 students. While teaching at UCLA, she lived in a medieval-style castle in the countryside of Agoura with her parents and a menagerie of animals.

At UCLA, Holmes became friends with historian Page Smith, who, in the early 1960s, was recruited as the first provost of Cowell College at the brand new University of California, Santa Cruz. Smith invited her to join the college as a lecturer and she became one of the first women faculty at UCSC. Although she retired from UCSC in 1977, she continued to give public lectures in Santa Cruz for several decades.

Holmes’s sister, Sara Boutelle, once told a reporter, “Of course, she’s not really an academic. She never has been and never wanted to be one though she has degrees and honors and all the trappings. But something about her lectures just captivates people–her magnetism, really, that brings out the best in other people. I’ve known her all my life and she’s always been that way."

Art
While she may not have been a traditional academic, Mary Holmes’s broad academic background was essential to her artistic practice: she believed that “there is no powerful sustaining tradition in art today so it is extremely important for the artist to know as much as possible about everything." Her art reflects a diverse interest in stories from all over the world and across time: ancient India, medieval Germany, the French Renaissance. Although she draws from diverse subject matter, she rarely painted from a live model or photograph. Instead, “She relies on her long experience as a painter of figures and her profound knowledge and imagination."

Holmes’s culminating work was the chapel that she built on her property in the early 1990s. Within its three rooms, she curated paintings to specific themes: The Wisdom Chapel exploring the myths and meaning of womanhood, the Holy Spirit Chapel featuring nine gifts of the Holy Spirit, and the Lady Chapel telling the story of the Virgin Mary.

Animals
Mary Holmes admired and cared for animals all her life. A photo of Mary and her son, Michael, each on horseback, appeared in the Iowa City Press-Citizen in 1946 when Mary was teaching at the University of Iowa. The caption charmingly states that the two were, “sure that the automobile will never replace the horse. Both find riding the ideal way for getting away from the classroom routine." On her property in Santa Cruz where she built her chapel, Holmes kept horses, cows, sheep, goats, chickens, peacocks, dogs, and cats.

In her art as in her life, Holmes included animals alongside the human figures. She considered this practice aligned with Hindu art which often portrays figures as either part-animal or with an animal counterpart. For example, Ganesha with the head of an elephant or Shiva with the cobra, Vasuki, around his neck. On a personal level, she believed that, “Animals are terribly important to people. I have a very strong theory that people who are not accompanied by animals suffer from that."

Legacy
Mary Holmes died at Dominican Hospital in Santa Cruz on January 21, 2002. In one obituary, John Dizikes, a fellow faculty member at UCSC, remembered Holmes as “an incomparable colleague, there was no one like her. She was delightful company. I admired her intense professionalism as an art historian, which she rather disguised because she was full of so many eccentric opinions. Above all I admired her courage; she was indomitable, that's the word."