Mary Bayard White is a founding WEAD Board Member. She joined the board in 1996, became co-director in 2021, and is currently board chair. She is a Bay Area sculptor/arts educator, working at the intersection of environmental and social justice, human interface with the natural world, community arts, and placemaking. She has exhibited widely and is an innovator in the realm of recycled glass sculpture. In 2026, she was recognized as one of the exceptional women artists working in glass in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s—the breakthrough decades of the American Studio Glass Movement in Tough Stuff: Women in the American Glass Studio, curated by Tami Landis and Rïse Peacock, at Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York.
Mary started her career as a high school art/graphics teacher in Oakland, California, and then taught for nineteen years at the San Jose State University (SJSU) Spatial Arts program, leading the SJSU glass program. After rewiring (rather than retiring) from SJSU, she taught Art and Ecology and Art in the Garden at St. Mary’s College of California, worked at the Oakland-based maker space The Crucible, led many workshops, and has shown extensively. She earned an MFA in Glass and Painting from California College of the Arts (CCA), as well as a BFA in Ceramics and a Secondary Credential in Art and English from CCA.
Select projects include:
- Project with Akataka tribal youth in Grand Bayou, Louisiana, to design and build new art glass windows for their new church after their original church was destroyed by the Katrina storm
- Collaborating with scientists, artists, engineers, city officials, and ecologists to design and build an 18-foot flood level marker and flood education signage in the high-risk Boulder, Colorado, downtown floodplain
- Collaborating, as a Fulbright Scholar, with MFA art/design students and Irish Craft Council cohorts in Dublin, Ireland, on a two-semester seminar and symposium on craft as a vehicle for social justice.
View Mary Bayard White’s artist portfolio here.