"It's never too late to be creative in your life. Robert Bly, a famous poet who spoke here this fall, is a good example," says Maryellen Munger, an 82-year-old artist in Overland Park. Her work is in demand and has been featured in many invitational exhibitions, from Johnson County to Montana to Texas.

Munger is a native Kansan who grew up in Hutchison and attended K-State University, where she majored in fine arts. She married her college sweetheart, Glenn Munger, and they moved to Johnson County. Their three children, Ron, Becky, and Mark, attended Shawnee Mission schools.

Munger has enjoyed drawing since childhood. However, only since retiring from teaching children in the Fine Arts Department of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in the 1970s did she turn to sculpture in clay. When son Ron was in the sixth grade, she served on the Village Church arts committee and, looking for a new medium, she tried working in clay for the first time.

Alex Kutchins, a professional sculptor, shared studio space with Munger and became her mentor. He, too, encouraged the petite artist to work in clay.

More recently, Munger joined the mid-town studio of Linda Lighton, internationally known ceramic sculptor. The studio, a vintage trolley barn, once housed horses for the trolleys. There she enjoys the feel of working with clay and the satisfaction of creative designs coming into being. She does extensive research to help plan each piece.

For example, she completed a series of figures and scenes based on the life and works of French artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. About this series Munger says, "One body of work, the "Too-Loose Friends," consists of my interpretation of the drawings and paintings of Toulouse-Lautrec. I love the characters in the everyday life of the 1800s and the ways those characters move. My line drawings take form in my sculptures."

When she completes her planned designs, Munger builds an armature to support the clay. Each finished sculpture is dried and then kiln-fired. She colors some of her pieces by painting the surfaces with clays and then firing them, a technique called terra sigillata. She finishes others with acrylic paints.

Satire is often an inspiration for Munger's art.

"When I had just finished a sculpture of Picasso with his seven loves, 'La Femmes de Picasso,' I heard a news flash," Munger recalled. "It reported that a 78-year-old Parisian confessed she had an affair with Picasso when she was 19. My piece 'Surviving Picasso—Genevieve,' depicts her as Picasso's 78-year-old lover."

Her colorful political sculptures are humorous, and viewers can appreciate her ideas whether or not they agree with her message. In November 2011, the Vala Gallery in Mission featured a retrospective of Munger's work. Penny Thieme, owner of the gallery, titled the exhibition "MEM—Wars: The Life and Humor of Maryellen Munger in Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture."

Munger likes to say that "life is much too serious not to laugh at it."

She explains, "My work becomes satire as I react to our social and political times. It can be fun, whimsical, and at the same time have a serious message, depending on the viewer. For future works, I'll respond to the unknown, and that is what makes creating art so exciting for me."

When not working at her art projects, Maryellen has chaired the Spotlight Gallery and serves on the hospitality and holiday outreach committees at Unity Church of Overland Park. She volunteers at the Village Presbyterian food pantry and enjoys her bridge group, which has been in existence for 30 years. She has been president of the Kansas City Artists Coalition and has taught art classes for persons living with Alzheimer's disease.