In addition to being a teacher and an artist, Mary Hope Cabaniss was also a poet. Her gravestone in the Laurel Grove Cemetery in Savannah, Georgia, bears the following epigraph: “He hath put a new song in my mouth. Even praise unto our God,” a version of Psalm number 40, verse three. Mary Hope’s older sister Lila Marguerite Cabaniss was also a teacher and painter, and for much of their lives they lived together in Savannah.
Mary Hope Cabaniss spent most of her life in Savannah and was heavily tied to the local creative scene. She studied with several northern artists who taught classes at the Telfair Academy of Arts and Sciences under the auspices of the Savannah Art Club including William Chadwick, 1924–1926, and Eliot Clark, 1924 and 1925. Walter W. Thompson, who would have been head of the Savannah Arts Club in the 1930s as well, also influenced Cabaniss with his own Post-Impressionist style. Cabaniss also studied with Adolphe Blondheim who was affiliated with the Bucks County, Pennsylvania, school.
Cabaniss held the position of supervisor for art for junior high schools in Savannah. She also taught at the Beaufort, South Carolina art colony that Walter Thompson had co-founded and where he was active between 1934 and 1939. At times the colony was linked with the Brevard, North Carolina art colony. In both instances the emphasis was on landscape, which was also Cabaniss’s specialty. When she died in 1941 her obituary was carried in two Atlanta, Georgia, newspapers which cited that her funeral was attended by many Atlanta friends.