M. C. Richards

Deceased Person

1916 – 1999

58

Who was M. C. Richards?

Mary Caroline Richards was an American poet, potter and writer, best known for her book Centering in Pottery, Poetry and the Person. Educated at Reed College, in Portland, Oregon, and at the University of California at Berkeley, she taught English at the Central Washington College of Education and the University of Chicago, but in 1945 became a faculty member of the notoriously experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina.

Later in life she taught art at the Institute in Culture and Creation Spirituality at Holy Names College. ICCS was founded by former Roman Catholic and current Episcopal priest Matthew Fox.

She was married in 1943 to Vernon Young, and secondly in 1945 to Bill Levi.

The correspondence between Mary Richards and James Herlihy is preserved at the University of Delaware Library.

She spent the list 15 years of her life living and working as a volunteer at Camphill Village Kimberton Hills, where she worked with residents with developmental disabilities and took up painting, and where the film “M.C. Richards: The Fire Within” was made. "Her art-of-many-genres wove together all her concerns, including community, agriculture, craft itself, and spiritual ideas. Always a poet, she regarded the end of her life – as physically limiting as it was - as another fulfilling adventure, “living toward dying, blooming into invisibility.” - Margaret Wakeley

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Born
1916
Education
  • Reed College
Died
Sep 10, 1999

Submitted
on July 23, 2013

Citation

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