Mary Hackney Wicker was born in 1868 to a prominent family in Aurora, Illinois, the daughter of Benjamin and Lydia Wrightman Hackney, early settlers.  She attended East Aurora High School, pursuing art, music and literature with a group of friends who she later described as “Aurora’s Intelligentsia.”  As her interest in painting grew she studied with two local artists, Howard Bagg and Wells M. Sawyer, who later established an international reputation as a landscape painter.

After high school, Mary Hackney moved to Chicago where she studied at the Art Institute.  In Chicago she met and married Charles Gustavus Wicker Jr.  Wicker, a land developer, was one of the first leaders to fight for public access to the lakefront in Chicago. Wicker developed land in the Loop, held several public offices, including that of Chicago City Council member, and donated the park land in the Northwest side neighborhood that is still known as Wicker Park.

In 1906, with the support of her husband, Mary Hackney Wicker traveled to Paris to study at the Academie Julian, a private art school that was popular with Americans.  She was accompanied by her son, Walter, who she enrolled in a private school in Passy.  She then enrolled herself in one of the Julian’s studios for women, which charged twice the fee of the studios for male students and offered half the instruction.  Wicker thrived at the Julian.  She continued to develop her skills in the academic tradition of painting while becoming familiar with the impressionist style that had first been exhibited in France in the 1870’s.  In Europe, she was a pupil of such outstanding painters as Claudio Castellucho and Frank Brangwyn.  In America, she studied with Charles Hawthorne, Hovsep Pushman, Leon Gaspard, Robert Henri and George Elmer Browne, all nationally known artists.

Wicker studied in France until 1907.  Her husband Charlie joined her in August, 1906, and the couple, often accompanied by their son, toured France, Belgium, Holland, North Africa, Spain and other countries.  She also toured Mexico, California, the New England Coast and the Mid-West. Wicker recorded these travels with her camera, sketchbook and paint.  These studies provided the information as well as the inspiration for some of her finest paintings.

In 1909, Charlie Wicker was killed in a sailing accident.  She may not have been able to paint very much during the following years as she was a deeply grieving, widowed mother of a young son.  At some point she began to paint regularly again but refused to exhibit until the 1920s, when she finally began to believe that her work was worthy of display.  Beginning in 1922 she exhibited in many venues, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the professional members of the Arts Club, Chicago; the Annual Exhibition of the Allied Artists of America, New York City; the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts; the Art gallery of the Women’s Worlds Fair of 1928, Chicago; and the Annual exhibition of the National Academy of Design, a traveling exhibit.

Chicago was her principal base of operations, and while she had a studio in New York for some years, her most active period as a painter was in her Chicago studio at Delaware Place.

Mary Hackney Wicker died in 1942.  The paintings that she had created over a lifetime of serious training and study were bequeathed to her granddaughter, Nancy Wicker.  Ms. Wicker has offered to bequeath this collection of more than 100 works of art to the City of Aurora, Illinois, provided that the works can be placed on permanent display.  According to their web site from which this information was obtained, the Aurora Public Art Commission is currently exploring a variety of options for housing the collection.  She was a 2006 inductee to the Fox Valley Arts Hall of Fame, for which she was nominated by the Aurora Public Art Commission.

SOURCE: Aurora, Illinois, Public Art Commission Gallery; notes on the artist.