MaryFrances Kelly-Poh
“I always wanted to be an artist, but I knew I was going to starve, so I chose to take another route,” says MaryFrances Kelly-Poh in a matter-of-fact way, about her life path. That route was a career in healthcare, a path that led her to a home in Solano County, meeting her husband in Vallejo, and teaching herself needlepoint. She displays her award-winning needlework and watercolors at First Street Arts Gallery in Benicia. “I’ve done needlework for more than 40 years. I love doing it.” She is entirely self-taught in needlepoint, bargello, and cross-stitch. She stitches almost exclusively using silk and metallic threads, most often creating her own designs.
Kelly-Poh has created a huge amount of needlework. Some works present a mosaic of blocks of various stitches, randomly sized and sampler style, while others follow a meticulously designed symmetry. Her color palette is an important component of her design. Some works reveal decorative stitches done with vivid jewel-toned threads. Others are dominated by neutral colors and tone-on-tone palettes. Many works take months to complete, from design to execution.
Kelly-Poh was born in Macon, Georgia, one of twin sisters. “My dad was an electrical engineer, working for Lockheed, and he got transferred around the country.” The family moved to Marietta, then Brunswick, Maine, followed by Madison, Wisconsin. “That’s where I graduated from High School. We left there the day my sister and I graduated, and it was 50 degrees. We landed in Marysville, and it was over 100. I thought I was going to roast.”
She completed her Bachelor of Science in Nursing at Chico State University, doing her rotations at Travis Air Force Base Hospital in the mid-sixties, during the Vietnam War. She graduated in 1968. Three days after passing her nursing exam she broke her arm. “I had no money, and no job, but I had an apartment in Fairfield and my landlord agreed to take my rent once I got my disability payments each week. I had wanted to move to San Francisco, but I stayed here out of necessity. Of course, I know now, it’s close enough and I’d rather not live there. And then I met my husband Henry Hoe, at Vallejo General. He was a physician there. We were together for 52 years.”
She worked for the California Nurses Association in the 1970s as a consultant for nursing negotiations. “There’s a lot of wait time during negotiation sessions, hours and hours, sometimes into the wee hours of the morning,” she recalls. “I had to have something to do, or I was going to eat everything in sight. So, I started doing needlepoint.”
MaryFrances and Henry moved from Vallejo to Benicia in 1972 and she worked as a nurse in her husband’s practice for the next 25 years. “At that time, if you couldn’t afford a house in Vallejo, you moved to Benicia.” Years later, she got a certificate in non-profit management and worked at the Benicia Community Action Council for 15 years, retiring in 2010.
“I continued to do needlepoint until I retired. But afterward, I turned to other media. I took art classes together with a friend at Solano College in Fairfield and learned watercolor. I took drawing classes from Larnie Fox at Arts Benicia and watercolor classes from Samantha McNally. I’ve been doing watercolor for eight years now.”
Her subjects are varied, but most often florals, using a highly saturated color palette. “I’ve done landscapes and some plein air work. I enjoy mixing colors, something you can’t do with thread.” Kelly-Poh has also experimented by embroidering her watercolors, adding stitches and beading to accentuate line and color. “I like to structure my time, spending a couple hours on my needlepoint, a couple on my watercolor painting, and a couple hours doing tasks on the computer. If I didn’t structure myself, I wouldn’t get anything done.”
Kelly-Poh was a charter member of the HQ gallery, formed in 2016, and currently serves as chairperson. The non-profit and volunteer-run gallery was renamed First Street Arts in 2025. Located at 333D on First Street, the gallery has 13 artist members with room for more. “We have introduced a lot of artists to what it’s like to be in a gallery. We do different things, like book readings and classes, to bring people in, to look at the gallery and look at art.”
MaryFrances is a member of the Embroiderers’ Guild of America, the California Watercolor Association, and Arts Benicia. She enjoys working in her garden and growing organic vegetables. For more information, visit https://www.maryfranceskellypoh.com/ and https://www.firststreetarts.org/.
First Street Arts is open Thursday through Sunday, 11 am to 5 pm.
