Born in Ohio in 1953, Mary Whyte grew up with all the
rural Midwest has to offer. She graduated from Tyler
School of Art in Philadelphia, PA in 1976 with a Bachelor
of Fine Arts degree and teaching certification.
Mary Whyte has earned national recognition as an artist
although she works in both watercolors and oils, she is
most recognized for her figurative watercolors. Whyte’s
portraits grace hundreds of corporate, university, and
private collections, and her paintings have been included
in numerous exhibitions. Several museums have
purchased her portraits for their permanent collections
including the Greenville County Museum of Art,
Greenville, SC and the Gibbes Museum of Art,
Charleston, SC.
An avid teacher, writer, and art juror, Whyte has
conducted painting workshops each year in different
locations across the country for the past twenty years.
Several of her articles have been featured in American
Artist and Watercolor magazines. Whyte’s instructional
book, Watercolor for the Serious Beginner (Watson-
Guptill, 1995), is now in its seventh printing. An Artist’s
Way of Seeing (Wyrick&Co.), by Whyte, was published in
2005.
Mary Whyte, known for her mastery of watercolor, is to be
the subject of CBS television’s “Sunday Morning”.
“Sunday Morning” is a news magazine program, airing
from 9:00 am – 10:30 am EST on Sunday mornings on
the local CBS affiliate.
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Mary is working on paintings for a future museum
exhibition entitled “WORKING SOUTH” - a series of
portraits of southern American workers in vanishing
professions. This work reveals an intimate portrayal of the
lives of an America that is disappearing, a people that
progress and outsourcing have left behind: cotton
pickers, boat builders, textile mill workers, crabbers, the
shoe shine man, and shrimpers. Traveling the South for
three and half years, Whyte has taken the unseen and
given them a face we cannot easily forget.
Whyte has illustrated over a dozen children’s books,
having several projects published by Chronicle Books
and Dial Books. Many of the illustrations are now in
collections of private individuals and institutions including
the Mazza Collection of Children’s Book illustrations of the
University of Findlay in Ohio.
In 1991, Mary Whyte and her husband Smith Coleman,
moved to an island on the South Carolina coast and
developed close friendships within the African-American
community. Soon after her arrival and quite by accident,
she met Alfreda LaBoard, and her intrepid group of senior
citizens who gather weekly to make quilts and socialize in
a small rural church. Long time residents of Johns Island
and descendants of slaves, these women would change
her life and her paintings in astonishing and unexpected
ways. Mary Whyte’s book, Alfreda’s World (Wyrick &
Company, 2003), is about the shared experiences and
values that deepened the friendship between the two
remarkable women. The story is told in the touching
watercolors and drawings that the artist created over a
ten-year period.
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