Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Painting
Website: maryfetherolf.com
Mary Fetherolf was born in New York City and now lives and works in San Francisco, California. A painter working primarily in acrylic and oil, she has focused since the early 1990s on figures, portraiture, and landscape, with a particular interest in how people relate to one another and to the settings — beaches, parks, transit cars, backyards — in which she places them.
Fetherolf has exhibited steadily in the Bay Area and the Hudson Valley since 1992. Solo exhibitions include shows at Canessa Gallery in San Francisco (2001), Maguire gallery in Alameda (2011), and the Third Floor Gallery at Mahopac Public Library in Mahopac, New York (2025). She has shown in group exhibitions at San Francisco Women Artists Gallery, Arts Mid Hudson, Howland Library, Barrett Art Center, and Redux, among other venues. Her paintings are held in private and public collections across California, New York, Massachusetts, and Maryland, as well as in Dorset, England.
In 2026 her painting Three Friends Contemplate the Sea was selected as a Juror’s Choice in the “Natural Rhythms” exhibition at San Francisco Women Artists Gallery, and her painting The White Dog received an Honorable Mention in the Painting/Drawing/Murals category of the Sheridan Prize for Art, a juried competition open to artists across the San Francisco Bay Area.
Fetherolf is a representational painter of figures and landscapes, working mostly in acrylic (occasionally oil) on canvas, panel, or paper. Her paintings tend toward quiet, observational scenes of everyday sociability — friends gathered at the shoreline, swimmers, a dog on a walk, commuters on a train — rendered with a loose, painterly hand and an attentiveness to the small negotiations of space and attention between people.
Recurring subjects include the beach and coastal scenes (the ongoing “Women on the Beach” paintings), domestic and social vignettes, and works that draw on her own biography moving between the East Coast and San Francisco, such as Metro North and The Irish in America. Her most recent multi-panel work, the Duboce Park Series, turns this same interest in people-in-place toward a San Francisco neighborhood park.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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