Textile artist Nancy MacKenzie often found materials for her sculptures and wearable art in the woods and fields around her rural Stillwater home. She turned dogwood and willow twigs, barbed wire, baling twine, plastic netting, onion bags and other improbable stuff into imaginative concoctions that have been featured at galleries and museums throughout the Midwest and as far as Japan, Chile and New Zealand.
"Her work was unique and innovative," said Tim Harding, a Twin Cities textile artist and friend. "When you saw it, you always knew it was Nancy's."
MacKenzie died Oct. 1 of cancer that had recurred after decades in remission. She was 80.
Tall, elegant and poised, MacKenzie was an urban sophisticate at ease in the sometimes snooty milieu of art galleries and museums. But she was most comfortable at the rustic home and studio she shared with her husband, Warren MacKenzie, an internationally known potter and regents professor at the University of Minnesota. He survives her.
Each had their own work space — hers a loft in the house, his an adjacent kiln complex and showroom. Their 30-year partnership became a role model for dozens of artists, and especially potters, who emulated them by rehabbing old farms and setting up studios in the St. Croix River Valley and western Wisconsin.
"It was a romanticized lifestyle in a way, the exemplar of a certain way of being," said Lyndel King, director of the Weisman Art Museum at the U. "They ... were warm, welcoming, gracious, smart, but they never belonged to the glitterati set. They just aren't that kind of artist or people."
Born in Naches, Wash., Nancy Stevens grew up on an apple farm. There she mastered the down-home culinary skills that later made MacKenzie dinner parties so popular.
"She won these cherry-pie baking contests as a teenager and was crowned the Cherry Pie Queen of Yakima County a couple times," said her son, Mark Spitzer, an associate professor of creative writing at the University of Central Arkansas.
