Hannah Holliday Stewart was an American abstract sculptor whose monumental bronzes, built around references to sacred geometry, astronomy, mythology, and physics, and to a long iconography of female mythical and historical figures, placed her at the forefront of the postwar Houston art scene before she withdrew to a long Albuquerque seclusion in her later years.
Hannah Holliday Stewart (January 25, 1924 – February 23, 2010) was an American sculptor, born in Birmingham, Alabama, into a wealthy socialite family from which she quickly distanced herself. She earned her BFA at the University of Montevallo in Alabama and her graduate degree at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, where she studied bronze casting, welding, and woodcarving. After Cranbrook she moved to Houston and built her career there, receiving a public commission for Atropos Key, the eleven-foot abstract bronze installed atop a hill in Hermann Park in 1972, at a moment when public sculpture by women was a rare proposition.
Her work brought together second-wave feminist iconography with broader references to sacred geometry, astronomy, and physics; the titles of her abstract sculptures and the subjects of her figurative work often reach toward Egyptian queens, Greek goddesses, and other female mythical and historical figures. She exhibited in more than forty venues across the United States, including the Smithsonian, the San Francisco Museum of Art, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. Around 1990 she moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she continued to produce bronzes in relative seclusion until her death.