Mary McChesney sculptures installed at The Astro Motel in Santa Rosa

For more than half a century, Mary Fuller McChesney lived and worked atop Sonoma Mountain, creating her distinctive sculptures, many inspired by Mayan and Aztec mythology.

Now some of those pieces have been brought down from the mountain for a two-month installation at The Astro Motel in Santa Rosa.

“We think of The Astro as also a museum of mid-20th century furniture, architecture and art,” said Bob Guffanti, general manager of the motel. The former motor lodge on Santa Rosa Avenue, which was remodeled and reopened in 2017, has a distinctively retro style, down to its midcentury fixtures and breeze-block exterior.

Led by Santa Rosa arts advocate Spring Maxfield, a team has moved from Sonoma Mountain 15 of McChesney’s works carved from concrete and vermiculite, a mixture that’s easier to cut into than pure concrete but can be fragile and requires preservation and conservation.

“We’re grateful The Astro stepped up to allow us to show these pieces. Many haven’t been seen by the public, and they’re incredibly delicate,” Maxfield said.

Maxfield broached the idea of an art show with McChesney over a lunch meeting in 2016, she recalled.

“I wanted to have a show of her work on Sonoma Mountain,” Maxfield said. That plan never came to fruition.

McChesney died May 4 at an assisted living center in Petaluma. She was 99. Her husband, Robert McChesney, a prominent painter known to friends as “Mac,” died in 2008.

“I only knew Mary briefly, but I still had a show of her work in mind because I realized what an amazing postmodern sculptor she was,” Maxfield said.

Maxfield and her husband, local artist Todd Barricklow, brought down some of the many sculptures McChesney made and kept at her Sonoma Mountain home. Created over the past 50 or 60 years, some of the sculptures weigh up to 200 pounds.

“Our guess is that many of these sculptures were created where we found them on the property, right where they stood,” Barricklow said.

Maxfield is handling this project through the nonprofit Santa Rosa Urban Arts Partnership, which is dedicated to strengthening the local arts community.

The installation also includes three bronze sculptures by McChesney from the collection of Dennis Calabi, owner of the Calabi Gallery in Santa Rosa and a longtime friend of the McChesneys.

“Spring Maxfield called me and said The Astro was fixing up the place with a lot of midcentury Arts and Crafts, and I thought it’d be great to have some of Mary’s work there,” Calabi said. “It’s good for Mary’s legacy and for potential sales.”

Calabi hopes to have a special show of work by both of the McChesneys later this fall. He previously helped put on a show of her work at the Petaluma Arts Center in 2009.

“I always have had a display of Mary’s art at my gallery, usually eight or nine pieces,” he added.

Some of McChesney’s statues are currently on display at the San Francisco International Airport, and there are permanent installations of her work scattered around Sonoma County and the greater Bay Area. Her sculptures also can be found across California in parks, private gardens and public plazas.

Mary Fuller was born in 1922 in Wichita, Kansas. Her family moved to California when she was an infant, and she grew up in Stockton.

Largely self-taught as an artist, she studied philosophy at UC Berkeley. During World War II, she was a welder in a Richmond shipyard.

In 1949, she married Robert McChesney, an artist, printmaker and teacher. As left-wing artists, they faced pressure from anti-communists in the early 1950s. Mary was fired from a job teaching adult education art classes in Point Richmond when she refused to sign an oath disavowing communism and other radical beliefs. They moved to an artists’ colony in Ajijic, Mexico, near Guadalajara.

It was there she discovered the Mayan and Aztec mythology that became the theme of her sculptures, Calabi said. After the McChesneys settled on Sonoma Mountain in 1952, Mary continued to pursue those themes. Before that, she had been influenced by the contemporary abstract art of her time.

Built in 1963 in the heyday of the American motor lodge, The Astro was remodeled into a 34-room urban motel in 2017 by Spinster Sisters restaurant owners Eric Anderson and Lisa Hinman and professional cyclist Andy Hempsten.

The Astro served as a residence for the homeless during the COVID-19 pandemic, from 2020 until last March.

You can reach Staff Writer Dan Taylor at dan.taylor@pressdemocrat.com or 707-521-5243. On Twitter @danarts.