Background
Mary Cabot Wheelwright was born on October 22, 1878 in Boston, Massachussets, the daughter of Andrew Cunningham Wheelwright, a merchant, and Sarah Perkins Cabot.
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Mary Cabot Wheelwright
Edit ProfileEducation
Her formal education was minimal, but she played the piano and studied singing.
Career
Wheelwright knew and loved the Maine coast, and could navigate under sail. Although her early years were spent chiefly in New England, she accompanied her parents to California in 1897 and toured France with them in 1906. After her father's death in 1908, she and her mother traveled in western Europe (1909) and in Greece and Egypt (1912). For forty years Wheelwright remained the dutiful Victorian daughter, devoting herself to good works, particularly a settlement-house music school in the South End of Boston. Since she was dyspeptic, gawky, and opinionated, she did not attract suitors; but after her mother's death in 1917, she conquered her shyness and set out to see the world. Wheelwright went to New Mexico with her cousin Evelyn Sears, riding and camping with cowboy guides. She became so attached to the Southwest that in 1923 she bought the Los Luceros Ranch near Alcalde, N. M. She visited remote places in Spain and the eastern Mediterranean, buying Son Batle, a beautiful farm on Mallorca, in 1931. After acquiring these houses she left Boston and bought a tiny shipmaster's cottage on Sutton's Island, Maine. Wheelwright loved everything about the Maine coast. In 1928, when British Ballads From Maine was about to be published without tunes, she brought a musicologist from North Dakota to Maine at her expense. In a month he took down 199 old airs that greatly enriched the publication. Despite her sketchy education she had an instinctive feeling for what ought to be done, and the energy and means to see that it was done. Wheelwright had great curiosity about the most unlikely things. In New Mexico, despite the barrier of language, she won the friendship of a famous Navajo medicine man, Hasteen Klah, whom she first met when snowbound on the Navajo reservation. With his help she learned to appreciate the Navajo religion, began to collect the record of its ceremonies, and in 1936 founded the Museum of Navajo Ceremonial Art at Santa Fe, N. M. For the museum she provided a building modeled on a Navajo ceremonial hogan. The symbolic paintings in colored sands that are an essential element of Navajo ceremonies are rubbed away at the conclusion of the rite of which they form a part. Their designs and meaning thus remain only in the medicine man's head. To insure the preservation of the most important of these, Klah wove thirteen blankets to perpetuate his designs for the Hail and Night chants. These, plus hundreds of watercolor and casein copies of sand paintings from other ceremonies, are preserved in the museum, as are sound recordings of chants and many ceremonial objects. Wheelwright went to India in 1940 to search for symbols comparable with those in Navajo rites. She also studied symbolism in primitive religions in many parts of the world, producing a study published by the Peabody Museum at Harvard University (1956). Although she continued to summer in Maine, Wheelwright concentrated all her resources on the Museum of Navajo Ceremonial Art. (Being the victim of a prudent Boston family trust, she had a handsome income for life but no control of the capital. This protection against fortunehunting suitors made it impossible for her to endow the museum as she would have wished. ) On the twentieth anniversary of the museum in 1956, the chairman of the Navajo Tribal Council sent a message thanking Wheelwright "for undertaking with courage what could only be accomplished in the most intangible awareness of spiritual tranquility and symbolic beauty. She has accomplished this and she has done it well. The Navajo people will be forever grateful to her for this achievement of building the things of the spirit into visible and physical form in the Museum of Navajo Ceremonial Art. Wheelwright died at Sutton's Island. Her museum continues under a board of trustees, who in 1976 changed its name to the Wheelwright Museum, an act that she would have deprecated.
Achievements
Personality
She was dyspeptic, gawky, and opinionated.
Connections
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Born
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Died
July 19, 1958 (aged 80) -
Nationality
American