Mary Adams Holmes

Mary Adams Holmes (May 8, 1910 – January 21, 2002) was an American artist and art history professor. Her work integrated 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. 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. She later transferred to Miss Haire's School for Girls and studied there until her parents moved to Musselshell, Montana, when she attended Hannah Moore Academy, a boarding school near Baltimore, Maryland.

When Holmes returned to the United States, she enrolled in Johns Hopkins University to study with Max Brödel, a pioneer in medical painting. After a year as a teacher at her alma mater, Hannah Moore Academy, she enrolled at the University of Iowa She credited this experience with compelling her to acquire a depth and breadth of material which improved her abilities as a lecturer.

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 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 members at UCSC. She believed that “the whole function of art is to make visible what is invisible”. Her art reflected a diverse interest in stories and across time: ancient India, medieval Germany, and the French Renaissance. Although she draws from diverse subject matter, she rarely painted from a live model or photograph.

Holmes’ 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.

Personal life 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 appearance. There, they opened a student boarding house and art salon. 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.

While teaching at UCLA in the 1950s, she lived in a medieval-style castle in the countryside of Agoura with her parents and a menagerie of animals.