MFA, California Institute of the Arts
BFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
BA, Washington University
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 minerals, 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.
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 minerals, 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.
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. Mayer’s writing
has appeared in X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly and ART21 Magazine, as well as
in her artist’s book, Loose Lips Loosen Lips. She contributed a chapter on social
practice art to the Institute For Figuring’s Crochet Coral Reef book. 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. She will
mount a large-scale solo exhibition at the Rubin Center for the Visual Arts in El Paso,
TX in early 2026.