Born in 1924 in Corning, New York, of Irish parents (“La” was a childhood nickname she preferred to her given name, Mary), she dropped out of Smith College in 1944 to marry U.S. Navy serviceman David Wilson, who was to become a prominent Akron attorney. It was after moving to nearby Hudson in 1946 with David and their two children that La enrolled in a weekly painting class at the Akron Art Institute (now Museum) with LeRoy Flint that ended after two years. That was her only formal art instruction, but it started her painting avidly. Soon, following a strange compulsion, she found herself affixing little objects onto her canvases, which gradually morphed into hanging sculptures. “I had no rules to follow, and it gave me freedom.”

She first exhibited one of her “constructions” in the Institute’s 1959 Spring Show; in 1967 she captured three honor awards at its annual juried exhibition—and had her first one-woman show, at the Ross Widen Gallery. By the end of the ’80s Wilson had been taken on by a New York art dealer, the John Davis Gallery in SoHo. In 1993, she walked off with the $1,000 First Prize for Sculpture at the Cleveland Museum of Art’s prestigious May Show. Her pieces, some of which have sold for as much as $5,000, would eventually find their way into more than 100 private collections around the world. Her work, often described as “a celebration of the ordinary,” proved in fact to be something far more interesting: the familiar transformed into the unexpected, an art that surprises even as it delights.