Mary Tooley Parker is a textile maker using wool and other fibers as paint. After a career in dance followed by art production at Vanity Fair and GQ magazines, Tooley Parker left New York City for a more rural environment. She began pursuing an interest in textiles of different forms, eventually leading her to the American folk art of rug hooking. Her hooked artwork focuses on realistic interpretations of people and nature whether from memories, dreams or visual images. Incorporated in her work are new and recycled wool, cotton and silk fabric, fleece, handspun and mill-spun yarn, silk fiber, and metallic fibers. She uses natural and synthetic dyes to create colors as needed. Her textiles have been exhibited in galleries and museums from New York City to London to Denmark and are held in public and private collections. Tooley Parker has been featured in a number of solo shows as well as group shows including The Untitled Space exhibitions, "IRL: Investigating Reality," "ONE YEAR OF RESISTANCE," and “UNRAVELED.” Museum exhibitions include the Hudson Valley Museum of Contemporary Art, Arnot Art Museum, and MOCA Westport. She is a member of the National Association of Women Artists, and the Silvermine Guild of Artists, and was awarded a Fellowship by the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2015. She has since also served as a NYFA panelist. Art critic John Yau recently wrote a review of her work in HYPERALLERGIC where he remarked, “Tooley Parker has taken a folk art form that emerged in the mid-19th century and transformed it into a way of recounting a slice of rural life in the early 1960s. Her memorialization of key periods in her early life is quirky, tender, and winsome. The softness of her tapestries exudes a welcoming comfort."
