Mary Beasley Nye (1916-1998)

She was born in Texarkana, Arkansas in 1916 and moved to Dallas with her family when she was six.  Her father, Howard Beasley, owned Whittle Music Company in Dallas, and her mother, Mary Beasley, was a trained musician who patronized the city's opera and other arts organizations.

Mary Nye studied art at the University of Colorado in Boulder in the 1930s and married lawyer, writer, and folksinger Hermes Nye in 1937.  In the early 1950s, the Nye house at 3309 Hood St., facing Lee Park, became a salon for artists, musicians and writers in what is now the Dallas Arts District.  Mary Nye turned the high-ceilinged, wood-frame house into an art gallery in 1956 with the object of giving established as well as aspiring Dallas and Texas artists a place to show their work.  Between 1956 and 1963, Mary Nye showed or purchased the work of Otis Dozier, Cecil Casebier, Octavio Medellin, Heri Bartscht, DeForrest Judd, Betty Winn, Hiram Williams, Donald Weismann, Chapman Kelley, Wilfred Higgins, Bror Utter, Bill Heaton, Etienne Ret, David Brownlow, Stephen Rascoe, Jack Fletcher, Ethel Broadnax, Fred Mitcham, Ruth Tears, Ed Bearden, Charles T. Williams and others.

In 1963, Mary Nye closed the gallery on Hood St. but continued to represent Dozier, Casebier, Rascoe, Higgins, and Hiram Williams for varying lengths of time until quitting the art business in 1983.  She placed paintings in many of the new office buildings and corporate suites springing up in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area.  She also introduced many Dallasites to art collecting by placing paintings in their homes, often on a rent-to-buy basis to make sure the client was happy living with their chosen painting.

Mary Nye studied painting with Otis Dozier at the Dallas Museum of Art in Fair Park, executing a small number of oil paintings in the 1950s. In later years, she became an accomplished water colorist, choosing old Victorian houses as her favorite subject matter.  Dallas interior designer Ben Sanford placed some of Nye's best watercolors in the neonatal parents' waiting room at Parkland Hospital shortly before her death in 1998.

Information provided by the artist's son, Eric Beasley Nye