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Remembering Maryanne Kayiatos

Thursday, June 6th, 2024 1pm-2pm

Dear friends and family,

It brings me great sadness to announce the passing of my one-of-a-kind aunt—one of the all-time greats—Mary Anne Kayiatos.
She fought like hell for the rich, full, aesthete’s existence she’d made for herself, and remained active, on her phone and on her feet, dressed up, decked out, with full makeup and Big Apple—red manicure, digging in the garden dirt down to her last days on earth. Concluding a ferocious four-year fight with cancer, she died at home, surrounded by loved ones and caregivers in her beautifully appointed Van Ness apartment, on the evening of Thursday, May 30, 2024.

Mary Anne was a tough old broad, as she liked to say, with a New York—specific grit that never got washed away. Born in Brooklyn in the nineteen forties, she made her way back to Manhattan by the seventies, following a seldom mentioned juvenile stint in Jersey City. Perhaps because her formative years—bridge and tunnel be damned!—afforded her a three-sixty view of the Statue of Liberty, Mary Anne was destined from the get-go to be larger than life.

Pulling herself up by the bootstraps, she put herself through business school at Baruch College and became a real-life Mad (Wo)Man: a lady Don Draper with closely cropped burgundy curls, big Linda Carter—glasses, and a dirty martini, extra dry, three olives on the side.

It was at this time, as she soared to the top of her mostly male profession, that she began getting down after hours with the bustling downtown art scene. Once it started, her love affair with art proved infinite and intricate: over time she would be an artist’s darling, a muse, a patron, a student, an expert, a collector, and an admirer—often many things at once. But Mary Anne and art, like Mary Anne Anne and Manhattan, should never be thought apart from each other.

Indeed, her big, bedazzled heart pumped and bumped to the rhythm of New York—even after she relocated to a shaky San Francisco in 1989, in order to be nearby her younger brother John and his family. She wrapped her impressive advertising career up with a bow in the Bay Area and enjoyed an early retirement, in which she brought her East Coast—borne interest in art out west by volunteering as a docent for the young at multiple museums (SF MoMA, the DeYoung, the Museum of Asian Art), as well as the Strybing Arboretum. Inspired by the comparative spaciousness of her new state, Mary Anne cultivated a passion for gardening in the plot she maintained for thirty years at the Fort Mason Community Garden. She won awards for her roses and earned a reputation as an aficionado of flowers and a flower floozy.

Much like her many closets, Mary Anne’s life was absolutely stuffed to the brim with her favorite things: fine art, good food, fun times, fascinating people. She was a true lover of pleasure and a grower of beauty, whose greatest masterpiece was her life itself.

Mary Anne is survived by her niece, Anastasia Kayiatos; her nephew, Rocco Kayiatos-Smith, and his wife, Tricia; and her sister-in-law, Diana Kayiatos. Although a confirmed bachelorette with no children of her own, Mary Anne was indeed everybody’s fabulous Auntie Mame, and she will be missed by the countless “nieces,””nephews,” and friends she found both near and far over her glorious eighty-three years.

Thank you for adding something special to my Auntie Mary Anne’s life and keeping her memory sparkling and vital.

With appreciation,
Anastasia Kayiatos