Mary Mann stood at the windows of the Antique Sandwich Company near Ruston with a chalk pen, free-handing snowflakes, foxes, rabbits, bears, raccoons and moose onto the glass.
She was drawing backwards so the scene would look right to anyone peering in from the sidewalk.
The annual winter window painting arrived early this year. Mann told The News Tribune she was heading to Montana to care for family for a couple of months, so the seasonal scene had to go up before she left.
Mann, 63, has painted more than 30 buildings around Tacoma and Pierce County since she began doing large-scale murals in 1995.
Two Indigenous mermaids have adorned the side of the Antique Sandwich Company since 2011. A fist with "253" finger tattoos clutches dandelions on the corner of 6th Avenue and North Prospect Street.
Railroad workers and timber barons pose at South 56th Street and South Washington Street off South Tacoma Way.
A Wright Park mural is visible from the Stadium Thriftway parking lot, and another piece decorates the Tacoma Little Theatre on North I Street.
Her largest public mural, "Ripple Effect," is a series on the underpass of Schuster Parkway next to Chinese Reconciliation Park. According to Mann's website, the Tacoma Arts Commission commissioned it, and Public Works funded it. She completed it in September 2023.
Mann grew up in Tacoma, lived for a time in Denver, and returned to paint. She worked 16 years as an art teacher at the Science and Math Institute until two years ago. When she started doing murals in the mid-1990s, she was one of the few muralists in town, she told the News Tribune.
Now the city has many, each with a different style.
Her process has changed, too. She used to sketch designs with pencil and markers, then make an entire acrylic painting to scale. Now she renders designs digitally using tools like Procreate.
This past summer she completed a mural in Spanaway using a virtual reality headset for the first time. It projected her design onto the wall so she could trace an outline.
"Every time I'm outside working on something, we get a lot of feedback. People going by and honking their horn or stopping and talking," Mann said.
Her husband, Dan Sherman, a former house painter, often assists with her murals. Mann also keeps an eye out for calls-for-artist submissions and will do private projects.
Not all of her work has survived. Her first mural, an 80-foot-long painting of stone archways with panoramic views of Puget Sound and the smelter by Ruston Way, stood at North Tacoma Avenue and Division Avenue in the Stadium District. It was covered in 2002 when a new building filled the adjacent lot.
Next up: Mann plans to finish a mural at Illahee Middle School in Federal Way by spring break.
