'Seated Nude' by Carol LeMasney Hayes, 1954, California, Woman Artist, Stanford, Sausalito, Native American

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Signed lower right, 'LeMasney' for Carol LeMasney Hayes (American, 1933-2018) and dated 1954.

Carol LeMasney Hayes attended Oakland High School … Read more Signed lower right, 'LeMasney' for Carol LeMasney Hayes (American, 1933-2018) and dated 1954.

Carol LeMasney Hayes attended Oakland High School and studied art at Stanford University, graduating in 1955, While a student, she met and married her husband and, in 1958, they moved to Sausalito where they remodeled the hillside home where they raised their two sons.

Carol was a painting and drawing major at Stanford, and quickly learned sophisticated antique restoration skills, a talent she used for several important Bay Area antique dealers. Meanwhile, the family antique collection outgrew the house and garage, and in 1980, Carol started Summerhouse Antiques, at first in a collective in San Anselmo. The business concentrated on general antiques until 1989, when Carol and Allan made their first trip to Santa Fe. They quickly fell in love with Southwestern Indian pottery, and the business gradually evolved into today's Summerhouse Indian Art. In the years since, Carol mainly applied her restoration skills to pieces of that pottery that needed help.

They found the art so fascinating that they felt they had to tell people about it, and In 1991, their oldest friends, John and Brenda Blom, joined them on a Santa Fe trip. Together, the Bloms and the Hayeses built a joint collection and wrote a book, Southwestern Pottery, Anasazi to Zuni, which came out in 1996. A small book, Collections of Southwestern Pottery, followed in 1998. Carol became increasingly interested in the pottery of southern Arizona and set out to write a book about that specialized subject. However, they learned so much history that the book became a broad history of the Desert told with artifacts. She and Allan co-authored The Desert Southwest, Four Thousand Years of Life and Art, a 2006 Southwest Book of the Year. In 2012, Shire Publications of Oxford, England asked for a small-format book, and Carol and Allan co-wrote and photographed Pottery of the Southwest.

During those years, Carol served on the Sausalito Trees and Views Committee and on the Board of Directors of the Sausalito Historical Society. She and Allan also served on the Board of Directors of The Museum of the American Indian. See less