Home Artist Programs Supported Artists Mary Jane Parker

Mary Jane Parker

New Orleans, Louisiana

Five outdoor chairs sit in a row in front of a wall of rust-red, vivid green, and pale yellow leaves in this work titled Shadows. Some of the straps creating the backs and seats of the chairs are broken. The chairs, leaves around the feet, and a few spindly trunks in front of the back wall are outlined in graphite.

Shadows

2025

In this work titled Focus, a woman sits in a metal garden chair facing us in the left half of the composition. She holds one wrist with her other hand, and looks with brows furrowed just off to our left. The background is filled with white, lily-like flowers drawn in graphite against a wine-red background. Another chair sits in the lower right quadrant of the painting.

Focus

2024

A woman sitting in a metal garden chair is outlined in graphite on the right half of this work. She holds one hand to her ear as she looks off to the right, lips parted. A V of thin tree branches close to us span the composition, and a second chair sits empty to the left. The background is teal green around vines and flowers with crescent-shaped blooms drawn in graphite.

Distracted

2023

Gray funnel-shaped flowers and vines create a curtain across a cobalt-blue background and around a person sitting in a metal garden chair in this work titled Masked 1. The person sits facing us in the right half of the composition. The body, clothing, and hair, which completely covers the face, are drawn in graphite.

Masked 1

2022

Artworks shown are selected from works submitted by the artist in their grant or residency application. All works are copyright of the artist or artist’s estate.

About Mary Jane Parker

Mary Jane Parker is a white woman with short brown hair. She sits at a desk and smiles out at us. Works of art lie on the desk and hang on the wall behind her.

Mary Jane Parker’s work combines printmaking techniques with other media including drawing and glass. Parker received her BFA from LSU in Baton Rouge and her MA and MFA in Studio Art from Illinois State University in Normal, IL. Parker has received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship, two Louisiana Division of the Arts Fellowships, a National Endowment for the Arts/Southern Arts Federation Award for Excellence, and an NEA Independent Study Fellowship. Parker’s work is part of the permanent collection of the New Orleans Museum of Art, the LSU Museum of Art, the Center for Book Arts in New York, and numerous private collections. She is represented in New Orleans by Arthur Roger Gallery and is a member of the Baton Rouge Gallery. In addition to her active studio practice, Parker chaired and was a faculty member of the Visual Arts Department at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts.

Program Participation

Joan Mitchell Center Residency, 2026

Website / Social Links

“ Concepts of fragility, memory, and identity are recurring themes in my art. One of the major influences in my early work was the study of hysteria in women of the 1800's. I became fascinated by how the patients, who were photographed and studied by doctors, expressed their emotional turmoil outwardly through physical manifestations.”