ANNA MAYER

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 land. Mayer is a 2023 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow, a 2024 Houston Artadia Awardee, and a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts. 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), Greenwich House Pottery (NY), UT Visual Arts Center (TX), Blaffer Art Museum (TX), Ballroom Marfa (TX), California Museum of Photography, and Los Angeles Nomadic Division (CA). In 2021, Mayer was invited by UK organizations Arts Cabinet and the Leverhulme Centre for Wildfires, Environment and Society to conduct collaborative research with an engineer from the Hazelab at Imperial College, London. She participated in the 2024-25 Galveston Artist Residency (TX).

Education

MFA, California Institute of the Arts
BFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
BA, Washington University in St. Louis