A sculptor known for dream-fantasy ceramics

At 86, MaryLou Higgins was still creating art every single day from the studio in her Pittsboro home. She was still working clay with her hands until the day before she died last month.


Had she not suffered a stroke during breakfast that November morning, she would surely have been creating art later that day as well.

Art was always just there for Higgins. She was born into it, modeling for her artist mother as a child. But she allowed it to consume her throughout the rest of her life – as she said, “24 hours a day, seven days a week” – as she became nationally recognized for artwork ranging from textiles to clay, furniture to jewelry.

She would become most known for her sculptures depicting her signature dream fantasies, said Joe Rowand, who has been selling pieces by Higgins as the director of Somerhill Gallery in Chapel Hill since she moved to the area in the early 1980s.

But she was never one to stray far from the human form.

“She didn’t draw flowers or landscapes, she loved the human figure,” said Woody Higgins, her high school sweetheart and husband of 66 years.

MaryLou Higgins’ career was defined by her artistic talents, whether she was working for the military, or alone in her studio.

It started during World War II, when she was hired by the U.S. Army to do drawings in her native Milwaukee – of what, we’ll never know.

“It was so secret, she never told me,” Woody said with a chuckle.

The two were married when they were 20 years old, and they started a stereo photography business called Stereo by Higgins, taking 3-D pictures of things like the insides of freezers or other appliances, capturing the entire line of such things on slides.

When asked if they went to school to learn this craft, Woody said softly, “Oh no, we were just smart.”

But they knew they wanted to teach, and for that degrees in art and education were required. They both went to the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, starting their family along the way. All three of their children went on to be artists in their own right as well.

The couple spent the next few decades teaching art, first high schoolers, later college students, before retiring as associate professors. MaryLou would hold teaching positions at five universities or colleges throughout her career.

It was a career that evolved over time, first starting in weaving and textiles, later focusing on clay as her medium.

“She created soft sculpture, baskets, wearable art and extraordinary inventive fiber crafts,” Rowand said.

While living in Pennsylvania teaching art history, MaryLou Higgins combined her love of drawing with that of ceramics. She used underglaze pencils while collaborating with her husband on early ceramic pieces.

When she moved her focus from fiber to clay, she began with black-and-white drawings and stoneware, eventually adding color and using 22-karat gold glazes.

Though some of her early work is functional, including a series of cups and plates that were sold in galleries in New York and Maine, she eventually ditched the wheel and began working on built-up sculptured slabs that often had a “ceremonial attitude in their inventive shapes,” Rowand said. The work was “seemingly functional, but in reality were the icon of the form it represented in her imagination.”

When asked to issue a statement about her work for Somerhill Gallery, the artist had this to say: “Images of sculptural objects haunt me late at night and at dawn. I’m compelled to create my art works before a peace can settle within me for a short time.”

She continued, “In my mind, faces and designs and figures dance around striving to be drawn. Where they come from, so strong and compelling, I can only feel that they are what I am. All the previous souls that have come together to make me are stretching out to be part of my universe.

“Each sculpture feeds upon itself, dictating what the next one should be. Sometimes ideas leapfrog ahead so fast that I can’t keep up, thus I wake up each morning driven to create in an attempt to keep up with the ideas that float through my head.”

As deep and complex as art could be for her, Higgins was also eloquently simple about what she appreciated about its impact. “I love when people say they have a piece of mine and it makes them feel good,” she wrote.

“She was the most talented, giving person you’d ever want. We loved each other for 66 years,” Woody Higgins said, choking up. “We had a good life.”