With stylized forms and a nod to traditional history painting, Mary Sims spent a lifetime engaging viewers with her visual wit and whimsy. Her sprawling narrative paintings scattered with friends and family members dressed in costumes, tell stories filled with historical, mythological and biblical influences. Much of Sims’ work is on a large scale and filled with subtle flat shapes with specific and quirky details, reflecting her keen observational skills. Always staged, but never stiff, Sims’ portraits and still life’s are also rife with symbolism and uncanny combinations. Raccoons wreak havoc, folksy dolls bear witness, and frog figurines dot scenes that are otherwise occupied with more expected still life tropes of vases, flowers and patterned cloths. Sims worked magic withcolor, simultaneously delighting and unsettling us with rich, saturated hues and unusual combinations. She created subtle dimensionality, almost always leaving a flat, unmodulated color as the backdrop for these scenes. Sims’ work is decidedly peculiar and often nonsensical. We might leave scratching our heads in wonder at the exact meaning. But we return to absorb ourselves in their curious theater of mischievous charm.Mary Sims was considered a Memphis painter although she lived and worked in Eureka Springs, Arkansas for the majority of her life. She was the first woman accepted into the printmaking department at the University of Iowa, where she received a BFA. She did further studies in Rome and then received her MFA from Tulane University. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, she taught art at Southwestern at Memphis (now Rhodes College). Her work was frequently exhibited in the region and far beyond, including at her long-term dealers in Houston, Tulsa, Los Angeles and New York. Her work is in the collections of major private and public collections including John Grisham, Mary Tyler Moore and Burt Reynolds, as well as the Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock; The Assisi Foundation, Memphis; First Tennessee Bank, Memphis; the Kemper Collection, Kansas City; Memphis Brooks Museum of Art; Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson; nexAir, Memphis; Rhodes College, Memphis; and the Tennessee State Museum, Nashville, among others.