Leadership
Mary Davis Wallace
BSLA, MUP
Art | Culture Planner | Designer
Mary Davis Wallace is a cultural urban planner, designer, and public art expert dedicated to creating environments that integrate unique cultural experiences with thoughtful design.
With a background in municipal urban planning, landscape architecture, public art management, and construction administration, Mary Davis bridges a common divide between the creative process and project feasibility.
Mary Davis has led the creation of public art plans for municipalities and nonprofits ensuring that art, culture, and core heritage serve a lasting and transformative role in the development and planning of public spaces. Additionally, she is a highly effective communicator, mediator, and advisor as a land development cultural liaison.
Masters: Urban Planning, University of Southern California
Undergraduate: BS Landscape Architecture, NC A&T State University
A personal note
My love for art, space, and design began in the late 1990’s when I started a job at a garden center in North Carolina. I had no idea that almost 30 years later, I would look back at that time as a pivotal moment in the trajectory of my personal and professional life.
For many years I questioned the twists and turns in my career path; estate garden design (which funded my undergraduate degree in landscape architecture), private landscape architecture firms (in London and in US), regional planning, public art nonprofit management, academia, construction, parks planning, and then municipal public art manager and master plan writer. These skills amassed over decades (and some painfully so) to reveal a colorful, complicated, and comprehensive approach to the things I loved the most. I have been so fortunate to be able to pursue a dream every step of the way.
I look forward to contributing my skillset to those seeking to plan and implement art and culture into the built environment. I believe it can create a full-circle moment for how we see public spaces – to ensure meaningful experiences for the user are not value-engineered, but are pivotal elements within it.