Honoring Mary Wright, a Copper Country Legacy

Christmas is just around the corner and the search is on for the perfect holiday gift. So I was going to write about the 45th Poor Artist Sale; happening right now at the CLK School gymnasium. Forty artists, good spacing, masks; the best show for art in the Copper Country. But then I heard that Mary Wright had passed away and I had to honor this phenomenal woman. 

Cynthia Cote, director of the Copper Country Community Arts Center (CCCAC), said she first met Mary in 1988 at the Oasis Gallery in Marquette.

“Mary would bring giant bouquets of flowers to every reception. She was also creating phenomenal flower arrangements in the hospital lobby. I think these were the start of her large community art installations.” 

“The thing about Mary,” said Cynthia Cote, “is that she enabled people to discover their own creativity by bringing them along on her massive projects. The projects weren’t about her making something. They were about her helping to make something monumental happen. She always thought big and it required lots of participation, but her projects changed people and they changed communities. She’d find people all over; kids, grandmas, neighbors, people she met on the street... everyone was invited to participate. That was a beautiful thing.”

Provided by Miriam Pickens

In 1996, when FinnFest was in Marquette, she organized the painting and displaying of thousands of blue and white chairs at the Superior Dome in Marquette. In 2005 when FinnFest returned to Marquette, she went even further, enlisting volunteers to paint thousands of chairs all over the UP and literally up the Quincy Mine Hoist in Hancock.

This was a project that anyone with a few small cans of paint and a chair could participate in, and it was a sign of welcome to the visitors; of hospitality; “come have a seat”. Accessibility and visual impact were hallmarks of Mary Wright’s projects. In 1999, Mary Wright received the Governor’s Art Award, because of the large community projects she spearheaded.

I first worked with Mary Wright in 2007, engaging in her wonderful idea of the “Grandma Doors”. She obtained a large number of old doors, and people pasted pictures of their grandmother’s faces onto them. Then they painted in the rest of the body, wrote a description of their grandmother’s life, and these doors would be placed all over Quincy Street in downtown Hancock.

There was a part of me that thought this was ambitious in a crazy sort of way, but another part of me was saying, “Mary has a complete vision of what this can be, and maybe I should just jump on this train and see where it goes. I mean… isn’t this exactly how the coolest things happen in communities?”

Photo provided by the Copper Country Community Arts Center

It was a beautiful project—and a scavenger hunt. Working on those doors with other community members was really great.

Cynthia was at many of these worker bee sessions, and she commented “Mary genuinely wanted to know what each person; the 4-year-old and the 80-year-old, had to say”.

What a fun summer we had learning about the grandmothers whose descendants were our neighbors. So many struggles and joys, differences and common grounds. And the very bravery I saw in Mary Wright was the same bravery I saw in all of these women working hard to create a future and a legacy. Lori Johnson, Tourism and Marketing Director in Wawa, Ontario, was traveling through the Copper Country when he saw the doors. In 2008, Mary and a University student were invited to Wawa to help initiate a similar project, which resulted in hundreds of “Heritage Doors” throughout that community.

In 2010, Steve Wahlstrom displayed a collection of paintings reflecting his experience and struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder as a Vietnam War Veteran. The exhibit at the CCCAC was called “A Soldier’s Heart”. He talked about how Mary Wright had inspired him to start doing this work in 2008, which was not only therapeutic for him, but also for others as he shared his story and his work with other veterans. At the closing reception, Mary directed everyone to hold hands and form a circle. It was a deeply moving experience to be at that show and one I will never forget.

2011 was a big year for Mary. Rockland, the Opera, commissioned by the Pine Mountain Music Festival, was opening at the Rosza Center and simultaneously in Nivala, Finland; live-streamed all over the world. The story recounted a miner’s strike that occurred in the UP town of Rockland, where two strikers were shot and killed by sheriff’s deputies.  Mary Wright organized the StoryLine project to occur in conjunction with the opening. Cotton fabric panels were printed with pictures and stories of local families, written by thousands of local volunteers including the schools and Universities, and hung on clotheslines all over the Rosza Center and the Michigan Tech campus; the words “YOU ARE ALIVE AS LONG AS YOUR STORIES ARE TOLD.  THERE ARE HEROES EVERYWHERE, IN STORIES TO BE TOLD AND PASSED ON”, prominently included in the exhibit. She emphasized how this “…underscores the importance of capturing stories, and in my mind, the importance that we get these stories down and don’t let them evaporate.” 

Mary Wright (right) and Steve Wahlstrom at Wahlstrom’s art show. Photo provided by the Copper Country Community Arts Center.

Mary Wright’s story continued with several other projects like the giant mittens up and down Quincy Street in Hancock and decorative shovels lining M-28. But the big one was slated to happen in 2020.

At the age of 78, her health deteriorating due to Parkinson’s disease, Mary was the founding director of RiseUP, the local celebration of the 100 year anniversary of the Women’s Right to Vote. We met in a large group at the Portage Lake District Library, and in small groups all around town. Thanks to the hard work of so many volunteers, Mary’s inspiration for us to think big was foundational; parades, exhibits, collaborations with everyone, and “Sunflowers Across the Keweenaw”. Mary’s vision was for sunflowers to be planted up and down the highways of the Copper Country. She had over a hundred metal sunflowers fabricated. You’ve seen them around town. Individuals and businesses bought them to display in front of homes and businesses. 

In January 2020, the Women’s March celebrated this Anniversary, and sunflowers marched prominently during the Heikinpäivä parade in February. And then we all went into COVID-19 isolation, and almost everything was either postponed, canceled, or online instead of in person. Mary’s condition had been progressing, and she moved to Bayside Village in L’Anse. She survived the first wave of Covid that went through that facility in the fall of 2020 and passed away on November 15, 2021, of age-related causes.  

RiseUP member Faith Morrison recollects “Mary was an exceptional person.  She was full of ideas and had the will to carry them out.  It takes chutzpah to imagine Finnish blue and white chairs up against the Quincy Mine Hoist for FinnFest—and then to get it done.  Mary could go big—she wanted suffrage sunflowers from one edge of Michigan to another!  She wanted the Rozsa Center covered in tens of thousands of StoryLine panels celebrating our ancestors.  She pushed everyone to scale up, never down.  She got the most out of her collaborators and audiences.”

A group of organizations in Marquette are planning to create a series of events in 2023 to celebrate her legacy. If you have artifacts associated with any of these projects that you are willing to share or loan, please call 906-227-3212 or e-mail heritage@nmu.edu.