NEW YORK— Before she was a painter, Mary Heilmann was a frustrated sculptor. When she came to New York in 1968, her goal was to experiment with new and different materials and “to play with the boys” — the boys being the likes of Donald Judd, Keith Sonnier, Richard Serra, and Bruce Nauman. Despite her best efforts, however, she couldn’t gain acceptance into their group, and in defiance, she turned to painting.

At the time, formalism was in, with Minimalism and Color Field painting dominating the scene. Heilmann took these trends, along with her love of sculpture, and reworked them to create her own brand of geometric abstraction — a playful interpretation that includes bright colors, loose brushwork, and a distinct lack of self-seriousness as its hallmarks. She added pop-culturally savvy titles like Tomorrow’s Parties to her images of squares and rectangles and made her lines wavy rather than straight, a reference to the ocean and the beaches of her native Southern California. In addition, the learned sculptor approached her canvases as if they were three-dimensional objects, building her own stretchers, stapling different-shaped canvases together, and painting over the edges and onto the sides.

Recognition came slowly for Heilmann. It wasn’t until 1986, when she joined Pat Hearn’s New York gallery, that she began to feel accepted by fellow artists, and only in the mid-1990s that her work really began to take off commercially. Now, at the age of 68, she seems more visible than ever. After being featured in this year’s Whitney Biennial and chosen, along with John Waters, as the 2008 Armory Show’s commissioned artist, she has her first solo exhibition in a New York museum, a retrospective opening on Wednesday at the New Museum. (It originated at the Orange County Museum of Art last year.) The retrospective, which runs through January 26, is bookended by shows at Zwirner & Wirth (through October 25) and 303 Gallery (January 10 – February 21, 2009).

In anticipation of the opening at the New Museum, ARTINFO spoke to Heilmann about her fame in New York, her Wabi-sabi worldview, and why she still prefers sculpture to painting.

Mary, you're known primarily as a painter, but you originally studied sculpture and ceramics at UC Berkeley.

Yes, I went to Berkeley to work in ceramics with Peter Voulkos. As I began to do more and more sculpture, I experimented with traditional New York School sculpture materials like welded steel and cast bronze. I also tried woodworking, even carving. Right around the mid-’60s, polyester resin was invented, and John McCracken did his wonderful planks leaning against the wall, the first ones like that. Then Bruce Nauman made sculptures using polyester resin and fiberglass in a very rough, organic way, and he leaned some pieces against a wall. I was inspired by both of those guys and started to make things out of plastic — and I leaned them against the wall.

How did you end up becoming a painter?

I made things based on the wall right from the beginning. I made flat landscapes from earth and dust mixed with white glue to make a kind of clay. I put them onto canvas and stapled the canvases to the wall. I considered those sculptures — I wasn’t even thinking of painting. I was trying to get into the New York gang that was doing this primary-structure sculpture — Carl Andre, Robert Smithson, Richard Serra, and Keith Sonnier — but I couldn’t. Social relationships in the art world then, as now, were very sensitive. Also, the feminist aspect might come into it a little bit, but some women did get in, very successfully — Jackie Winsor, Eva Hesse, and many others. So it wasn’t strictly biased.

Anyway, we all had no respect for painting to speak of, but when I couldn’t get into the gang, I went ahead and said, “Okay, you guys. I am a painter.” I started putting color on these wall things that I was doing, and then I started building stretchers and stretching canvas. It was very much like making sculpture for me.

But you were painting, which was going against the grain. Was that difficult?

By the time I started painting, I was in the studio, working on my own. I wasn’t having conversations with anybody about what I was doing in painting; I was in the bars, mainly Max’s Kansas City, still trying to have a conversation with the sculptors. Even though I was working in the one practice, I still wanted to be a part of the other.

Do you still have that tendency toward sculpture?

Yes. I’ve used materials like a sculptor all along. At a certain point, when I was teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute, one of my students was a very gifted oil painter — he handled the material in a really funky way — and he taught me about oil painting. So I switched to oil paint, which really lends itself to painterly nuance — a Turner, de Kooning, or John Currin type of nuance. That traditional way of painting did sneak into my work a little bit then, but my style is still really rough and funky in comparison to some of those guys.

Your work clearly has strong ties to geometric abstraction, Minimalism, and Color Field painting, but what sets it apart is the tone, which is often described as “playful.” Was the informality a conscious decision?

It was, right from the beginning. I took a course in Asian art history as an undergraduate at Santa Barbara around the same time that I started making pots. This course taught me about Wabi-sabi, an attitude toward making things in the simplest, most basic way in order to let nature be a part of the creation. That appealed to my personality, because I’m not a careful, fastidious type of craftsman. I also thought that these Wabi-sabi forms were beautiful.

Were you mocking the self-importance of those movements — Minimalism, Color Field painting, etc.?

My work was often read as disrespect, but actually, I was totally enamored by Color Field painting. In school, we took a stand that we didn’t approve of painting — and Color Field painting was what was going on — but I thought it was beautiful. In order to have the conversation, though, it was more productive to say that you hated it and hated painting — you hated any pretty colors, any de Kooning–esque brushstrokes.

Where does your furniture fit in?

Ever since I started out as an art student living in lofts and warehouses, I have always built my own furniture. At the beginning, it was basically benches and tables. When I first came to New York, I made a table piece that was a sculpture, basically just straight post and lintel; it was very simple building. Then, about 15 years ago, I made octagon tables working with another artist, Steve Keister, and we put ceramic tiles on top.

But a table, even an octagon table, is easier than a chair. At one point, I had made some fabric, and I wanted to make a club chair with the fabric as the upholstery. So I made a very simple piece — the basic design probably owes quite a bit to Donald Judd’s chairs —  with a little cushion and a pretty, ruffly slipcover. But it wasn’t comfortable. We put webbing on it to make it comfortable, which worked, and the webbing looked fabulous, so we lost the slipcover.

Are there chairs in the New Museum show?

Yes, we use lots of chairs in my installations now, because they’ve become an important part of my practice of building a social space. When there are chairs in a gallery, people sit in them, and they stay longer.

This New Museum retrospective of your work feels long overdue, especially given the resumes of your male contemporaries. Do you feel you’ve been overlooked by the art establishment because of your gender?

I think the main reason it took people longer to understand what I was up to was my Wabi-sabi attitude. But the gender bias, which was very significant when I first came into art, even in graduate school, was actually a big reason why I did it. It was challenging to try to play with the boys, and, of course, fun.

The titles of many of your paintings suggest the importance of your upbringing in California. Have you ever thought about moving back there?

At a certain point I was planning to move back, in the early ’90s. I had nothing going on in New York: I was teaching part-time, I wasn’t making very much money, and there was no interest in my artwork. I decided to move back to California and get a regular academic teaching job. Then the market and the interest in my work turned around, so I changed my mind.

And now 2008 seems to be your year in New York, with the Armory Show commission, inclusion in the Whitney Biennial, and the retrospective at the New Museum. Do you have any thoughts on the convergence?

Fame is a virus. Lots of people now think Mary Heilmann is really cool and great without knowing that much about my work. Of course this thing has been building up for 40 years. I think the main thing that I did right was sticking with it.