Bio

Mary Pat Wager is a sculptor whose work transforms found and salvaged materials — metal, wood, clay and the accumulated objects of ordinary life — into three-dimensional forms charged with memory, history, and meaning. Working primarily through assemblage, welding, casting and fabrication, she creates sculpture that collapses the distance between past and present, asking viewers to reckon with what objects carry and what they leave behind.

Wager’s work is held in numerous public and private collections and has been exhibited nationally and internationally across more than four decades of sustained practice. Corporate collections include Blue Cross/Blue Shield, General Electric, Key Bank, McDonald’s Corporation, Omni Corporation, and Phoenix Life Insurance. Her work is also held in permanent collections at Castle Breitenbach Sculpture Park, the Quick Center for the Arts at St. Bonaventure University, the Schenectady Museum, and the State University of New York at Albany.

Her large-scale sculpture has been presented at outdoor sculpture parks and sites across the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, including Contemporary Outdoor Sculpture at Chesterwood in Stockbridge, MA; Sculpture Now in Lenox and Ossining, NY; Ten Broeck Mansion in Albany; Sculpture in the Streets, Albany; and on the Skidmore College campus in Saratoga Springs. In 1984, her work was selected to represent the United States at the 6th International Small Sculpture Exhibition in Budapest, Hungary — a distinction that remains a cornerstone of her international profile.

Solo exhibitions include shows at Albany Center Gallery, the Regina A. Quick Center for the Arts at St. Bonaventure University, Saratoga Arts, Sand Lake Center for the Arts, Martinez Gallery in Troy, Franz Badder Gallery in Washington D.C., Kirby Arts Center in Princeton, NJ, and institutions in Maine, Massachusetts, and New York. In 2026, she has upcoming solo exhibitions at the Lake George Arts Project (July–August) and the Woodstock Art Association (December–January).

Her work has been featured in International Sculpture Magazine, Sculptural Pursuit Magazine, the Times Union, and Canvas Rebel Magazine, and documented in the film Steel and Stone (Westfield Films, 2014). In October 2025, she was the subject of a profile on PBS’s AHA: A House for Arts (WMHT). She has received awards including the 2024 President’s Award from Albany Center Gallery, Best in Show at the Woodstock Art Association, the Mohawk Hudson Regional Arlene’s Artist Award – selected by juror Wolf Kahn, a National Endowment for the Arts grant & the Priscilla Ward Sculpture Award.

Wager’s teaching career has been inseparable from her practice. While completing her master’s degree at the University at Albany, she served as teaching assistant to Richard Stankiewicz — the sculptor widely recognized as the father of junk sculpture. She went on to teach as an adjunct professor of 3D design and sculpture at Russell Sage College (Junior College of Albany), Albany Academy for Girls, and the College of St. Rose, and served as a master teacher with the New York State Institute for the Arts in Education throughout the 1980s. For more than two decades, she was Curriculum Leader in the Art Education Department of the Averill Park Central School District. She currently participates in the Critical Forum program with NYFA and the Arts Center of the Capital Region, and has completed residencies at Maine College of Art in ceramics and printmaking. In 2013, she was named New York State Art Educator of the Year, Region 6.

Mary Pat Wager lives and maintains an active studio in upstate New York.