THE ART WORLD OF GURFER LADY
By Ava Bourbeau
A creative who broke the mold when it comes to what art means for South Floridians, Mary Glazier can be hard to describe. Her shifting motifs don’t move with the premonition of cogs, but there’s a throughline all the same.
Mary, also known as Gurfer Lady, came from humble roots and is — not to downplay hard work — kind of just going with her own flow. She has built a surf community that embraces surfing as art and vice versa, and without a precedent to follow, each installment of the Gurfer Lady movement is created freely, and with the intention to inspire creativity. Just as vital as her time in the ocean is her material art — collages, embroidery, and textiles born from thrifted magazines, vintage surf imagery, and the kind of found materials most people would toss away. Basically, whether you see her leading dozens of women in a paddle out at Lake Worth Pier or using safety scissors to repurpose paper scraps with a classroom of children, art is in progress.
Mary grew up in a creatively resourceful family in South Carolina. As a teenager, she’d be in attendance at late-night concerts with her two older brothers and was also a constant witness to the ways her dad channeled art into everyday things. He may have been an accountant, but he could often be caught doodling on family photos or befriending the trash men to repurpose the items that others discarded.
“I feel like it was always a very simple, slow pace. And the family I grew up in was just always very resourceful, I guess, with how we were creative,” Mary said. She kept those lessons and continued exploring them into adulthood. During her college years, Mary dipped her toe into art as a profession with a fiber arts business called Thread-head, which sold hand-embroidered merchandise for various campus clubs and groups.
Later, after losing her job in hospitality during COVID, Mary leaned into surfing as a healing outlet. It was a hobby that she picked up a love for from her late brother. When women in the community started coming to her inquiring about surf lessons, Mary embraced the opportunity to share her passion with others.
“I realized the few girls I knew growing up only surfed because a boyfriend, dad, or brother taught them,” Mary said. As the self-proclaimed “slowest self-taught surfer ever,” Mary had a great ethos for other women to learn by, because she had overcome learning obstacles with patience, and in her own way.
Little by little, Gurfer Lady as a surfing movement was conceptualized. “Gurfer” because growing up, Mary was often the only girl surfer in the lineup. What started as solo surf lessons became group events, beach cleanups, group surfs, summer camps, educational seminars, and more.
Her art carries that same communal spirit. As a resident instructor with Resource Depot, Mary leads workshops for nonprofits and schools across Palm Beach County, teaching upcycling workshops that turn environmental lessons into tactile creations. Fittingly, the art that she is arguably most known for is her collages that use recycled materials to tell stories — from commissions with a personal touch, to creations that delve into Mary’s own imagination.
Her latest project is an exploration into West Palm Beach’s history in collaboration with the work collective, 1909. Over the course of a year, Mary completed a large-scale collaged wallpaper for 1909’s new space. Sourcing materials from the City’s archives, the collage looks at the history of development in the area and pays homage to some of the names who made West Palm Beach what it is today.
“Finding all these different faces that West Palm and Palm Beach have had over the past 100 years kind of gave me a really humbling and beautiful perspective,” Mary said.
On land or sea, Mary’s influence on art doesn’t live in a studio. It’s in the water between sets, on public bathroom walls, in nondescript classrooms, and even in the trash, but it’s easy to feel its ripple.
Photo by Marisa Ann Holliday
