Mary Nohl was born in 1914 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the daughter of a prominent lawyer and a mother with musical interests. After college at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she taught art in the Baltimore public school system for two years before returning to Milwaukee to teach. When her parents took up full-time residence at their cottage on the shore of Lake Michigan in Fox Point, Wisconsin, she joined them and devoted herself to art making.

Nohl’s interests were diverse, deeply inspired by the watery realm outside her back door and by her travels all over the world. She refused to be confined by artistic categorization and was omnivorous in her selection of materials and methods of making. In addition to operating a commercial pottery studio for a decade, she was a painter, sculptor, printmaker, woodcarver, writer, illustrator, cartoonist, and jeweler—yet she described herself as simply “a woman who likes tools.” After her parents died, she began to alter the lake house and property, embellishing most of the surfaces inside and out and filling the yard with her large sculptural creations.

After Nohl’s death in 2001, Kohler Foundation, Inc., took on stewardship of her life’s work. In 2005 the Mary Nohl home was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and it was named a Milwaukee County Landmark in 2006. In 2012 the John Michael Kohler Arts Center received the property and the individual artworks from the foundation.