Mary Aldwyth

Mary Aldwyth (“Aldwyth”) died at the age of 90 on Friday, April 10, 2026.  Aldwyth was a South Carolina artist whose intricate collages, boxes, assemblages, and paintings earned her a singular place in contemporary American art.  Aldwyth was born in Pomona, California and spent her childhood moving several times from coast to coast as the daughter of a Navy Chaplain, Captain Paul William Dickman and schoolteacher Muriel Margaret (nee Jones) Dickman. Among his numerous postings, her father was stationed for a time at the Paris Island Marine Corp base in Beaufort County, SC.  Aldwyth attended Beaufort High School for a year and a half and met her former husband there.

Aldwyth received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of South Carolina, and she had a lifetime of loving, studying, and making art.  She was a member of the Round Table of Artists in Hilton Head and was awarded many residencies at prestigious art facilities around the country.  Over the course of her long and quietly influential career, she created works of tremendous intricacy, wit, and intellectual force.  Though she worked for many years in relative isolation from the usual circuits of the mainstream art world, her reputation for making art that was both visually engaging and deeply meaningful steadily grew among curators, other artists, scholars, and collectors who recognized the originality of her vision.

Two major traveling exhibitions helped define her public legacy.  The first, Aldwyth: Work v./Work n. – Collage and Assemblage 1991–2009 , organized by Mark Sloan, traveled to the Ackland Art Museum in Chapel Hill, the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston, and the Jepson Center for Contemporary Art at the Telfair Museum of Art in Savannah between 2008-2010.  More recently, This Is Not: Aldwyth in Retrospect , a sweeping retrospective spanning nearly seventy years of work, opened at the Gregg Museum of Art & Design in 2023 before traveling to the Greenville County Museum of Art and then to the Coastal Discovery Museum.

Her achievements reached a broader public through Olympia Stone’s 2022 hour-long PBS documentary, Aldwyth: Fully Assembled .  Aldwyth’s art is held in numerous public collections including the Ackland Art Museum of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; the College of Charleston Foundation Collection; the Jepson Telfair Museums in Savannah; the John Michael Koehler Art Center in Sheboygan; the South Carolina State Museum in Columbia; the State Art Collection of the South Carolina Arts Commission; and the Greenville County Museum of Art.  In 2015 she was awarded the “Elizabeth O’Neil Verner Governor’s Award for the Arts”.  It was presented by Governor Nikki Haley and the South Carolina Arts Commission in recognition of outstanding contributions to the arts in South Carolina.

Along with her love of art, word games, and puzzles, she kept active by playing tennis, skiing, and walking.  She especially enjoyed walking on Hilton Head’s beach in the mornings to capture and share photos of sunrises. She was very involved and supportive of the interests and activities of her three sons and two granddaughters and found great joy in sparring on any subject with her best friend and sister, Joyce Keller.

Aldwyth was predeceased by her sons William Penland Thomas and Joseph Dickman Thomas and her sister Joyce Elizabeth Keller and brother-in-law C.H. “Jack” Keller.  She is survived by her son Calhoun “Reb” (Karen) Thomas, III of Columbia SC, granddaughters Rebecca (Riley) Martin, Margaret (Ben) Horst, great grandchildren Madi, Tommy, and Wesley, and many beloved nieces, nephews, and their spouses and children.

Aldwyth will be interred in a small private event with family and friends.

Donations in her name would be welcomed at the Coastal Discovery Museum ( CoastalDiscovery.org ), 70 Honey Horn Drive, Hilton Head Island, SC 29926 or Friends of Caroline Hospice ( FOCHospice.org ), 329 Friends Lane, Ridgeland, SC 29936.