Since its inception in 1981, Mary L. Beebe has been the Director of the Stuart Collection, an ongoing program commissioning outdoor sculpture for the 1200-acre campus at the University of California, San Diego. Major works have been completed by Terry Allen, Michael Asher, John Baldessari, Niki de Saint Phalle, Jackie Ferrara, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Richard Fleischner, Tim Hawkinson, Jenny Holzer, Robert Irwin, Barbara Kruger, Elizabeth Murray, Bruce Nauman, Nam June Paik, Alexis Smith, Kiki Smith, and William Wegman.

The collection has received considerable national and international recognition. Locally it has received two awards from the San Diego Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, one for the collection as a whole in 1989 and another for Alexis Smith's Snake Path in 1992. It was featured on CBS's Sunday Morning with Charles Kuralt in August '93 and received a National Honors Award from the A.I.A. in May 1994. A book documenting the first 20 years of the collection: Landmarks: Sculpture Commissions for the Stuart Collection at the University of California, San Diego, was published in 2001 by Rizzoli International Publications, Inc.

Prior to moving to San Diego, Mary Beebe was Director for nine years of the Portland Center for the Visual Arts in Portland, Oregon where she oversaw an important program of exhibitions, installations, performance art, music, dance and other major forms of artistic expressions in the seventies. Previously, she worked at the Portland (Oregon) Art Museum, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University. Beebe graduated from Bryn Mawr College and attended the Sorbonne University in Paris. Beebe serves on numerous boards and committees including the Board of Directors of Art Matters, Inc., New York, the Art Advisory Board for the University of California, San Francisco's new Mission Bay campus and the Public Art Committee for the San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture. She has been a member of the Art Steering Committees for the Greater Toronto Airport (Ontario) and the Denver International Airport, the Art Advisory Committees for the University of Washington, Seattle and Harvard and Radcliffe, Cambridge. She has lectured widely and served on many panels for the National Endowment for the Arts and as juror or advisor for public art projects across the country and in Europe.