anna mayer: the concrete world

The Concrete World will engage with the physical legacies of agriculture, mining, and environmentalism, as well as the belief systems and behaviors that humans maintain in order to participate in these fields. Mayer will work with the UTEP DoArt students on a collaborative project to be included in the exhibition. Together they will consider the concept of miasma (loosely translated as stain or pollution) and whether hands-on processes can help us process our inability to see.

Anna Mayer's methodology emerges from place-specific analogue firing projects and critical engagement with pre- and post-petroculture. She revels in the fact that historically ceramics have been used to create highly functional items as well as intensely symbolic objects. Through projects that enact various kinds of burial and recovery, she points to extractive and exploitative human behaviors towards the land. Mayer makes eco-critical artworks out of grief, about mourning, and to chart how influence and mutuality operate between generations of family and eras of art history. 

Mayer recently had solo exhibitions at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft (2021) and the Jung Center (2022), also in Houston. Other recent solo exhibitions include A-B Projects, AWHRHWAR, and Adjunct Positions, all in Los Angeles. Group exhibitions include Artpace (TX), Blaffer Art Museum (TX), Ballroom Marfa (TX), California Museum of Photography, Hammer Museum (CA), Glasgow International (UK), and Catherine Bastide Gallery (BE). Mayer is Associate Professor of Sculpture at University of Houston. In 2021 she 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 is a 2023 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow.