Mary Sherman began her writing career as a freelancer for the Chicago Reader, followed by working as the art critic for the Chicago Sun-Times and, later, as a regular contributor to The Boston Globe, Boston Herald, ARTnews and other publications. Her over two decades of writing include catalog texts, scholarly essays and more than 400 interviews, art reviews and think pieces for national and international magazines, journals and newspapers.

In addition to writing, Mary teaches at Boston College and is an artist and founding director of the international arts organization TransCultural Exchange, a nonprofit dedicated to fostering a greater understanding of world cultures through global art projects, artists exchanges and educational programming. She is also a member of the International Art Critics Association, a four-time Fulbright specialist grantee (Taiwan, 2008 and 2023; Norway, 2018; and Turkey, 2012) and has served as an artist-in-residence at such institutions as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, Taipei Artist Village and, most recently, Paris’ Cité des internationale des arts, among others. Her drawing Termite was the inspiration for Jayne Anne Phillips’ Lark and Termite (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009). Her early painting A Thin Red Line was used as the cover art for the paperback edition of Susan Fromberg Schaeffer’s The Madness of a Seduced Woman (Plume, 1983); and Nausicaa was the artwork for Sharon’s Lamb’s The Trouble with Blame (Harvard University Press, 1996).

Currently Mary is at work on her first book A Legacy of Deceit. It is part memoir, part Cold War investigative journalism, prompted by the many unexplained encounters she had with her late father, not the least of which was his once showing up at an airport, a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist.

See her latest articles in Hyperallergic, in the artsfuse.org and in print (the Spotlight Review) in the 2024 January/February issue of Art New England.