Ann Sayre Wiseman

1926 - 2013
Ann Sayre Wiseman was the first child of Evelyn Sayre Norton and Mark Huntington Wiseman. Born July 20, 1926, she died on April 23d, 2013, of ovarian cancer, in Corvallis, OR. She was married twice, to Dr. Weyer Vermeer (son Piet) and Peter W. Denzer (son Erik, aka Kiko).
She is survived by both sons, grandchildren Luca Vermeer and Isaac and Eben Denzer, brother John Wiseman, half-sister Margaret K. Norton, and half brother Carter Wiseman. She was pre-deceased by half siblings Mary (Armstrong) and Peter Wiseman.
She attended Little-Red Schoolhouse in Greenwich Village, City & Country School, Nightingale-Bamford, the Art-Student's League, and the Grande Chaumiere, in Paris. As a child, she attended the King-Coit Childrens' Theatre, and at sixteen, studied modern dance with Martha Graham. She earned a Master's degree in Expressive Therapies in an independent study program with a wide variety of teachers and institutions.
She started her career in 1944, with New York's Bliss Display Company. After study and travel in Europe, she designed textiles for Fuller Fabrics. While raising children, she free-lanced in crafts and illustration, wrote craft books, and taught. She was chair of the art department at Stuart Country Day School in Princeton, NJ, a resident artist at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, a trainer for the New Hampshire Commission on the arts, program director at the Boston Children's Museum, and adjunct faculty at Lesley College, where she also earned her MA. For thirty years she taught workshops on art, creativity, and expressive therapies for all kinds of audiences.
She exhibited widely, and has work in the Smithsonian/Hirshorn and Rockefeller collections, among others. She published 14 books on handcraft, creativity, and expressive therapy, wrote and illustrated Tony's Flower, a children's book about the MacDougal-Sullivan Gardens where she grew up, and illustrated Rose Brown's Bicycle in the Sky. Her popular activity book, Making Things, is still in print, and in 2013 she published Satisfy The Image, a method for creative, therapeutic use of imagery. She was a member of The Society of Women Geographers, Harvard's Theological Opportunities Program, and the International Association for the Study of Dreams.
She engaged people in conversations and/or problem-solving sessions wherever she went, and was always ready for travel and adventure. These she documented in illustrated journals which she donated to Radcliffe's Schlesinger Library. In a farewell letter she said "my body…has given me a wonderful life – taken me around some of the world – shown me 5 miracles every morning – taught me to look and taught me to how to see, how to love, how to draw."
There will be a small, private memorial in Oregon. Her ashes will be scattered in Bridgehampton, NY at a later date. Friends and family will be welcome, and should contact potlatch@cmug.com for more information.
Ann (aka Bibby, or Grannie Annie) loved email for staying in touch with friends, so a website has been set up to share memories and stories at annsayrewiseman.blogspot.com.