Anna Mayer uses ceramics—dirt that becomes stone-like once heated—to respond to colonial legacies within land use, archaeology, and 1960s-70s Land Art. Through ceramics projects that enact various kinds of burial and recovery, she points to extractive and exploitative human behaviors towards the land. Mayer’s various materials include human-made artifacts, soft and hard sediments, and complex psychological states. With these she explores various ways to access and imagine what is unacknowledged. Solo exhibitions include the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft (2021) and the Jung Center (Houston, 2022), as well as A-B Projects, AWHRHWAR, and Adjunct Positions, all in Los Angeles. Group exhibitions include Artpace (TX), Moody Center for the Arts (TX), Blaffer Art Museum (TX), Ballroom Marfa (TX), California Museum of Photography, Glasgow International (UK), and Catherine Bastide Gallery (BE). She is a 2023-24 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow and a 2024 Houston Artadia Awardee. She is part of the 2024-25 Galveston Artist Residency.
Additionally, Mayer has a 19-year collaborative practice with Jemima Wyman called CamLab, which has exhibited at MOCA Los Angeles and Hammer Museum. CamLab’s feminist and collective practice models a horizontal and intimate relationship, which they believe is necessary in a culture that devalues compassion, communal concerns, the mental health of women, and radical care. In 2021 Mayer was invited by UK organizations Arts Cabinet and the Leverhulme Centre for Wildfires, Environment and Society to be part of a research residency, for which she was paired with an engineer from the Hazelab at Imperial College, London.
Mayer received an MFA in Studio Art from California Institute of the Arts, a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a BA from Washington University, St. Louis. She was Assistant Director of the Los Angeles-based Institute For Figuring from 2009 – 2018. Currently she is Associate Professor of Sculpture at the University of Houston.
annawmayer [at] gmail [dot] com