Mary Adair

Mary Adair (also known as Mary Adair Horsechief, born 1936) is a Cherokee Nation educator and painter based in Oklahoma.

After completing her education, she first taught school and then worked in youth programs. She served as the director of the Murrow Indian Children's Home on the Bacone College campus in Muskogee, Oklahoma,^[2] and directed for the Cherokee Nation Jobs Corp Center before becoming the art instructor at Sequoyah High School in Tahlequah, Oklahoma.

Adair began her career as a professional artist in 1967. She won numerous art prizes and exhibited mainly in the Southeastern and Western United States. Places she exhibited includes Cherokee Heritage Center of Park Hill, Oklahoma; the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona; the Heritage Center at Red Cloud Indian School in Pine Ridge, South Dakota; the Museum of the Cherokee Indian at Cherokee, North Carolina; and the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma.^[1] She has pieces in the Five Civilized Tribes Museum in Muskogee, Oklahoma, as well as other public collections. Julie Pearson-Little Thunder interviewed Adair in 2011 as part of Oklahoma State University's Oklahoma Native Artists Oral History Project.