Rosemary Mayer: Ways of Attaching | Frieze
Oct 01 2021
The Top Four Exhibitions to See Across the Americas
Since her passing in 2014, Rosemary Mayer’s formally exacting, diverse and conceptually rigorous body of work has remained largely under-recognized. Yet, there’s no lack of venerable historical context for her practice: site-specific installations that presaged the modulation of performance art from public intervention to semi-private relational aesthetics; the phenomenological separation of painting from its stretcher bars; and a scholarly engagement with Western art. Then there are the well-established reputations of her contemporaries, such as Adrian Piper, Vito Acconci – an ex-husband who encouraged her off an academic pathway in classics towards visual art – and fellow writers like her own sister, poet Bernadette Mayer, with whom she grew up in the working-class, Catholic milieu of Ridgewood, New York. — Paige K. Bradley