In 1988, on the age of forty-four, artist Rosemary Mayer wrote an article titled “A few of My Tales” for the feminist artwork and politics journal Heresies. Weaving collectively her personal narratives and people of pals, she described ladies who have been underpaid and undervalued, a lot of them affected by most cancers, medicine, or males. Resigned but hopeful, Mayer additionally contemplated her personal standing. “Twenty years in the past was higher,” she wrote within the introductory poem, reflecting on her profession’s profitable daybreak and present stagnation, “And perhaps in twenty extra, / Will probably be higher once more.” Sadly, it took practically thirty years and the artist’s loss of life in 2014 for her work to realize the renewed consideration it deserves. Although she was a lifelong New Yorker, this exhibition at Swiss Institute is the primary survey of Mayer’s multifaceted oeuvre in her hometown, or wherever. That includes practically eighty works spanning her most prolific interval, from 1968 to 1983, “Methods of Attaching” encompasses conceptual texts, cloth sculptures, and associated drawings, watercolors of billowing material, mixed-media collages, and plentiful documentation of her performative public artwork tasks.
Mayer’s writing—as a critic, essayist, and translator—was typically entwined along with her artwork, so it’s becoming for this present to start with a sequence of text-based conceptual experiments from 1968–69 that register fleeting phenomena like firecrackers heard and cigarettes smoked. These matter-of-fact paperwork are displayed in a vitrine alongside a lot of contemporaneous material research. Seemingly incongruous, these works anchor Mayer’s parallel pursuits in language and temporality in addition to textiles and material, considerations that may finally overlap in her observe.
After making a sequence of work on unstretched canvas and different materials—an instance on satin is included right here—Mayer jettisoned her paints in 1971 and commenced working primarily with textiles. Initially, her cloth sculptures supplied a lyrical tackle postminimalism, as Mayer inspired the pliable supplies to precise themselves. Within the wall-bound Balancing (1972), two lengths of silky rayon and dyed cheesecloth drape from bowed rods and anchors set into the wall, evoking the sails of a ship. However the artist rapidly started setting up extra elaborate scaffolds for her readymade and hand-dyed textiles, leading to volumetric works like Galla Placidia (1973), produced for her debut exhibition at A.I.R. Gallery, of which she was a founding member, and proven solely as soon as since. For this commanding sculpture, Mayer layered translucent gauzes and iridescent satins in lavender, coral, and chartreuse, wrapping them round a suspended ring to create a billowing type that gathers at its heart and cascades to the ground.
Only some examples of those fragile sculptures have survived, however Mayer saved detailed photographic and hand-drawn information. Her whimsical but exacting drawings, of each completed and unrealized sculptures, type the guts of the exhibition. The sketchy Abracadabra Sailboat (1972) resembles an early formulation of Balancing, whereas the extra detailed De Medici (1972) paperwork the complicated star-shaped construction of a completed however now not extant sculpture. The knotted, sewn, and draped preparations conjured in a quartet of coloured pencil and marker drawings from 1971 display the variability and indeterminacy of kinds the artist was exploring—hardly ever did two concepts look alike. Mayer described these drawings as plans for “not possible items”—an acknowledgment of alternatives falling in need of her aspirations—and plenty of by no means escaped the two-dimensional realm.
Whereas Mayer continued making sculptures for gallery shows—works which might be lacking from this presentation—she started, in 1977, to publicly stage what she known as “short-term monuments” using ephemeral supplies. Nicely-documented within the second-floor gallery, these ceremonial occasions celebrated seasonal cycles and honored misplaced pals, relations, and even these unknown to her. For Snow Individuals (1979), put in in a library backyard in Lenox, Massachusetts, the place her sister, poet Bernadette Mayer, lived on the time, Mayer carved fifteen figures in snow and paired every with a placard that paid tribute to all of the Adelines, Fannys, Carolines, and different commonly-named ladies of the city’s previous. Naming performed a central function in Mayer’s observe: she ceaselessly titled sculptures after historic ladies, however she was simply as involved with memorializing these of her personal time. The balloons she lofted into the air from a barren discipline in Upstate New York for Some Days in April (1978) bore the names of her mother and father, who died when she was a young person, and Ree Morton, an artist pal then lately deceased, whose public tasks impressed Mayer to pursue related pageantry.
Mayer’s extremely private, evanescent tributes distinction sharply with the brashly monumental, industrially fabricated sculptures that her male friends put in in company plazas throughout the identical interval, in addition to the numerous historic statues that dot New York. The associated ephemera displayed right here, which embrace images, hand-drawn posters, and two evocative drawings of the “mooring knots” Mayer used to tether the balloons, file and protect these fleeting occasions, which regularly had little or no viewers. As a gathering of those surviving traces, the present presents an illuminating and overdue tribute to an artist who spent her time memorializing others.