Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Rosemary Mayer: Words in Art are Signs Returned.
Writing, for Rosemary, is an act of inscription in time. The exhibition, Rosemary Mayer: Words in Art are Signs Returned, presents the artist’s engagement with words and images as as a way of bridging, countering, and remaking linear time. For this program, curator Farren Fei Yuan joins critic Tausif Noor for a conversation where they situate Rosemary Mayer in the avant-garde art scene of the 1960s-80s through a series of friendships she had with fellow women artists and poets Bernadette Mayer, Hannah Weiner, Adrian Piper, and Nancy Spero—a network of feminist solidarity despite differences. They discuss these artists’ shared preoccupation with dailiness and ephemerality, their sources, and the value of writing and artmaking as means of making alliances across time. The conversation also reflects on what it means to be “in” and “out” of time, imagining an expansive notion of “contemporaneity.”
Tausif Noor is a critic, curator, and PhD student in modern art history at the University of California, Berkeley. He has written on Bernadette and Rosemary Mayer for The Nation, the Brooklyn Rail, the Poetry Project Newsletter, and Post45, as well as in conjunction with the recent exhibition Rosemary Mayer: Noon Has No Shadows, held at both Hannah Hoffman Gallery and Marc Selwyn Fine Arts in Los Angeles. Noor’s criticism and essays have appeared in Artforum, the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the New York Review of Books, as well as in various artist catalogs and monographs. Noor is a recipient of a 2023 Grace Dudley Prize for Arts Writing from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, as well as a 2023 Andy Warhol Foundation/Creative Capital Arts Writers Grant for Short Form Writing.
Farren Fei Yuan is a 2024 MODA Curates Fellow and curator of Rosemary Mayer: Words in Art are Signs Returned. She is an art historian and curator. Her research interests include feminist, media, literary, and aesthetic theories, particularly in relation to contemporary art practices that contend with questions of time, memory, history, and identity. She has contributed to curatorial projects at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Brooklyn Museum, Jeu de Paume, and Asia Society Hong Kong. She received a BA in History of Art from the University of Oxford.
MODA Curates is an annual opportunity offered by the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery and the MA in Modern and Contemporary Art, Critical and Curatorial Studies Program (MODA) for outstanding curatorial proposals related to student theses.
