Gabriella Polony Mountain

1918 - 2020

Gabriella Polony Mountain Acclaimed Kansas City artist Gabriella Polony Mountain passed away in her home yesterday at the age of 102. Gaby was born 1918 in Austro-Hungary in Sárvár, seven months before the end of World War One. The youngest of 4 children, she had intended to become a lawyer as had her father and 3 brothers and in fact studied law for three years, but then broke away to attend art school in England. Gaby eventually found herself at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest, and studied further in Rome. She later recalled, "I came home and told my father, 'I'm going to be an artist. He said, 'It's OK. You do what you feel you have to do. I hope you don't need money.' He thought that he could leave me money, but the Communists came (the Soviets liberating the city from German occupation near the end of World War II) and everything was lost." Late in the World War II, Gaby's parents were arrested by the Nazis and deported to a death camp in Poland. She would never seem them again. After the war, fleeing the Communists, she arrived in America in 1951 with her luggage and $120. Gaby made her mark as an artist soon after settling in Kansas City. Working in a modern expressionism style, she established herself by taking architectural commissions. She once told the Kansas City Star, "We need beautiful, perhaps elaborate pieces of art in the noble surroundings of modern architecture". Gaby went on to win a Huntington Hartford Fellowship, awarded by a foundation established by the A&P supermarket heir, philanthropist, and arts patron to foster community creativity in the arts. A year later, in 1955, she received a Louis Comfort Tiffany Fellowship named for the American artist and designer. In 1961 Gaby married Herman "Rocky" Mountain, who was the love of her life, and the couple remained together until Rocky's death in 2013. Gaby's art included mosaics, repoussé, and bronze, marble, terracotta, and wood sculptures. She also created stained glass, and weavings in wool and silk. Her themes were influenced by her views of the "cosmos", the family, as well as various religious motifs , and pieces can be seen in installations all throughout Kansas City and Missouri. A few notable examples include stained-glass windows in the chapel at Whiteman Air Force Base, stained glass at University of Central Missouri library, mosaics in the baptistery of St. Ann's Catholic Church in Mission Hills, Kansas, and the entrance floor of the Kansas City School Board Building, later the Kansas City Public Library (then located at 12th and Oak streets). Over the years, she created pieces for private homes in St. Joseph, Kansas City, Jefferson City and Springfield. She continued to express her artistic vision through exquisite work until her age made it too difficult to create. In 2015 she established The Rocky and Gabriella Mountain gallery at the Kansas City Public Library where young artists can display their work. Later she made donations of both art and materials to the University of Central Missouri. Gaby's work has been exhibited at the Cochran Gallery in Washington D.C., the Albrecht-Kemper Museum in St. Joseph, at the University of Central Missouri Gallery amongst others. Gaby is survived by her family in Bratislava, Slovenia and her nephew Peter in Kansas City. Due to Covid 19 and attendance restrictions, a drive-through visitation will be from 2-4 p.m. Thursday, May 21, 2020 at the McGilley State Line Chapel on the South side of the building.