ANNA MAYER

Anna Mayer uses ceramics—earth transformed into a stone-like material through heat—to respond to colonial legacies embedded in land use, archaeology, and 1960s–70s Land Art. Through ceramic projects that engage in various forms of burial and recovery, she highlights extractive and exploitative human behaviors toward the land. Mayer’s materials range from human-made artifacts to soft and hard minerals, as well as complex psychological states. With these, she explores ways to access and imagine what is often unacknowledged.

Her solo exhibitions include the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft (2021), the Jung Center in Houston (2022), 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), the California Museum of Photography, Glasgow International (UK), and Catherine Bastide Gallery (Belgium). Mayer is a 2023–24 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow.

In addition, Mayer has maintained a 19-year collaborative practice with Jemima Wyman under the name CamLab. Their work has been exhibited at MOCA Los Angeles and the Hammer Museum. CamLab’s feminist and collective approach models a horizontal and intimate relationship—one they view as essential in a culture that often devalues compassion, communal concerns, women’s mental health, 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, she was invited by UK organizations Arts Cabinet and the Leverhulme Centre for Wildfires, Environment and Society to participate in a research residency, during which she collaborated with an engineer from the Hazelab at Imperial College London. She will present a large-scale solo exhibition at the Rubin Center for the Visual Arts in El Paso, Texas, in early 2026.