Rosemary Mayer

Rosemary Mayer (1943-2014) was a prolific artist involved in the New York art scene beginning in the late 1960s. Most well-known for her large-scale sculptures using fabric as the primary material, she also created works on paper, artist books, and outdoor installations, exploring themes of temporality, history, and biography. A pioneer of the feminist art movement, she was a founding member of A.I.R. Gallery, the first cooperative gallery for women in the U.S. and had one of the earliest shows there. In 2016, Southfirst Gallery in Brooklyn exhibited a selection of Mayer’s work from the late 1960s and early 1970s. The first major exhibit of her work in over thirty years, it was reviewed in The New York Times, Art in America, The New Yorker, and artforum.com. In 2020, her work was introduced to European audiences through Nick Mauss’s exhibition, “Bizarre Silks, Private Imaginings and Narrative Facts, etc.,” at Kunsthalle Basel and “Rods Bent Into Bows,” at Chert Lüdde in Berlin. The show in Berlin was Mayer’s first solo show in Europe; it won the prestigious VBKI Prize for Berlin galleries and included in Frieze magazine’s list of the best shows in Europe. Exhibitions upcoming in 2021 include a solo show at Gordon Robichaux and the Swiss Institute in New York.