Rosemary Mayer

Rosemary Mayer (1943–2014), was an American visual artist who was closely associated with the feminist art movement and the conceptual art movement of the 1970s. She was a founding member of A.I.R. gallery, the first all-female artists cooperative gallery in the United States.

Mayer was born and raised in Ridgewood, New York, and lived in New York City for most of her life. She attended Saint Matthias grammar school in Ridgewood, NY, and Saint Saviour High School in Brooklyn. She studied classics at St. Joseph's College and the University of Iowa and fine art at the School of Visual Arts and the Brooklyn Museum Art School. She was fluent in Greek and Latin, and before studying fine art at SVA, according to Adrian Piper, she had refused Harvard University’s offer of a graduate fellowship to do a doctorate in the classics department.

Mayer worked in a variety of media including drawing, sculpture and installation. Her early text-based work appeared frequently in 0 TO 9, a publication edited by her sister Bernadette Mayer and Vito Acconci between 1967-1969 which is considered "a groundbreaking mimeographed magazine...which brought together the era’s leading figures of experimental poetry and conceptual art," including artists Sol LeWitt, Adrian Piper, and Dan Graham.

In 1972, Mayer was one of the women artists who co-founded A.I.R. gallery, at 97 Wooster Street in New York City. She exhibited her large-scale fabric sculptures for the first time there in 1973 in a two-person solo presentation alongside artist Judith Bernstein, in a show which was reviewed by Roberta Smith in Artforum; in the review, Smith commented on the interplay between drawing and sculpture in Mayer's work.

Artforum in Summer 1976 would publish a two-page feature on Mayer by Lawrence Alloway which included a reproduction of Galla Placidia, a work from that show. The work Galla Placidia was also the cover of Alan Sondheim's book Individuals: Post-Movement Art in America (1976); Mayer also contributed the essay "Two Years, March 1973 to January 1975" which discusses her fabric sculptures, to that book which included writing and poetry by various contemporary artists.

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