Arts on the Plateau: Enumclaw’s Florist Exhibits Her Work at Tacoma Art Museum

Imagine an artist arduously creating a beautiful work and then four days later it decays -and forever disappears. Such is the fate of the floral designer, an artist whose medium is exquisite living flora.

Floral designer, Mary Magalhaes of Young’s Enumclaw Flowers and Gifts, was among 25 floral artists selected to exhibit such works of art in a prestigious show. For four days their floral designs were a popular attraction at the Tacoma Art Museum (TAM) April 18 through 21 in a show called Flora & Fine Arts.
“It’s been a dream of mine to have a flower exhibit in a museum, that’s how strongly I feel that floral design is an art,” Mary told me Friday, the day the show opened. She also confided that from the day in early March that she was invited to participate in her first museum exhibit, her mind and imagination was in constant concentration, her hands sketching, designing and laboring over the project.

The Artistic Challenge

The Tacoma Garden Club (TGC) sponsored the show in partnership with TAM. The challenge for all the floral designers was to create artistic floral arrangements inspired by selected artworks on view at the museum. The artists were directed to choose from three of 65 art works on loan to the museum from the collection of BNY Mellon’s Drawing Line into Form: Works on Paper by Sculptors. The sculptors’ drawings, or paintings, came first and then their sculptures were modeled from their drawings. The 25 florists from the Puget Sound region were then informed which specific artwork they must model their floral creation after, replicating it as much as possible to the artists’ rendering. Mary was assigned a work called “Untitled” by Fred Sandback, a famous minimalist abstractionist whose work is simplistic and linear. Mary said the challenge for her was that Sandback would outline his sculpted objects in wire and suspend them, and that’s what she tried to do with her flower arrangement, replicating the same impressionistic style and color.

The Emotion of Art

When Mary attended the University of Washington she took art classes but her degree is in anthropology.  “When I was younger I had trouble appreciating abstract art like Jackson Pollock , Picasso or Rothko. But later it clicked with me that art is an expression of emotion so the idea of expressing an emotion in abstract painting came alive to me. Then abstract work seemed more organic to me.  And for me, flower designing is just another organic medium to express emotion.”

Mary is a self taught florist, her second career in life, coming out of a three year illness that had forced her to terminate her profession contracting for Microsoft as a paralegal. In her recovery, she started a home based floral shop in Maple Valley called the “Prancing Bee.”  Flowering helped her recuperate from this difficult phase in her life. “There are studies that show flowers lift your happiness level ,” she said.  Three years later Mary was invited to work as a floral designer for Carol’s Maple Valley Flowers (now Bud’s n Bloom). Then, five years ago she and her parents, John and Helen Locatelli, joined together to purchase and operate Young’s Enumclaw Flower & Gifts on Cole Street. The shop that has been in existence for 40 years and they kept the original name.

This is the second time this year that Mary has achieved acclaim as a floral designer.  In February, Mary was awarded the People’s Choice Award from 23 entries at the Northwest Flower & Garden Show.