“My first awareness of beauty came when I was nine years old. Standing above an oily puddle at a tiny neighborhood gas station with a stick I swirled the rainbow skies and continents., the oceans and fairylands.”

Mary Anne McLean has continued to combine the brutal and the whimsical in much of her work. She was one of six artists creating Allan Kaprow’s first happening in 1958. A volume of time-lapse drawings titled Mary Anne’s Garden was published in 1987 by Harry N. Abrams. Her work was also exhibited in a solo show at the Stamford Art Museum in 1994.