GHOSTS

They’re visible only for seconds and even then they change. They live in the fall of a sleeve or a skirt, the shapes in a coat laid over a chair. When the light changes they’re different or gone.

- Rosemary Mayer

Since 2020, the Estate of Rosemary Mayer has been making new iterations of the artist’s Ghost sculptures, which she created in 1980 and 1981 for several exhibitions. Following in the spirit and intention of the work and often referencing archival material from the initial appearances of the Ghosts from Mayer’s lifetime and her ideas about ephemerality, the Estate creates an iteration of Mayer’s Ghosts in response to the time, place, and context of a new exhibition. 

As with Mayer’s original works, each of these sculptures is temporary, existing only for the duration of the exhibition or occasion. The temporary nature of the Ghosts is connected to Mayer’s other ephemeral installations that she called Temporary Monuments, made with fugitive materials such as snow and balloons, and whose duration were determined by the weather or the season or other ways of marking time, such as a birthday or other occasion. These works were, and still are, a way to connect to time and place.

Although the new Ghosts are not preserved as sculptural objects, some of their materials are recycled, used in the next Ghost. The Estate considers the recent work on Ghosts as a continuation of Mayer’s practice, of making these works appear and disappear and then reappear in another form.

Irises celebrated the spring season of Mayer’s first exhibition in London. The iris was an important flower for Mayer and appears in many of her works. In a text about her balloon work Some Days in April, Mayer wrote, “Iris is packed like Pandora’s box, old gods, the center of an eye, the whole rainbow sifting down flowers in different colors, even wild by roadsides.” In London, in springtime, yellow flag irises bloom along the banks of the city’s canals.

Ghosts in the Garden was an installation of three ghost sculptures in David Horvitz’s Garden, the first time these works were made outdoors. They were inspired by one of the precedents for the Ghosts, a small sculpture of a scarecrow Mayer made in 1979, which was intended as a model for a monumental outdoor sculpture that she never realized. While the original plan was for the Ghosts to remain in the garden for a couple of weeks and then be dismantled, it was decided to keep them up for one year as an experiment, to see how they interact with the garden over time.

The two Ghost sculptures installed in this exhibition in Rome were inspired by a canephorae, a particular type of caryatid. The word means basket carrier, and in this variation, the woman’s head supports a basket, which becomes the column capital that supports the roof. (A well-known replica of this type is in an antiquities collection at the Villa Albani, near the MACRO.) Mayer was interested in caryatids as both a manifestation of female presence and a type of ghost, writing, “they live endlessly though seasons and centuries, slowly losing the fullness of curves, the sharp turn of an elbow, still supporting even when part of the once sheltering roof, or even all of it, is gone.”

Roses was created for Mayer’s second solo exhibition at ChertLüdde, which focused on Mayer’s interest in flowers, which she integrated into many forms and aspects of her practice. The Ghost was a new version of one she created in 1981 that celebrated the summer season. Alongside watercolors and drawings of flowers and floral forms, the exhibition highlighted the Ghosts as like flowers, defined by seasonal cycles, appearing and disappearing, and, as in the title of one watercolor, “Insistently Reappearing.”

1924 Ghost was made for Mayer’s first exhibition in Los Angeles, which took place at two venues, Hannah Hoffman Gallery and Marc Selwyn Fine Art in Beverly Hills. Inspired by the ways in which Mayer also connected the Ghosts to place, 1924 Ghost was an homage to the building in which the gallery is located. Built in 1924, the building has ornate façade decoration and is a noted example of Spanish Colonial Revival architecture that was popular in California in the 1920s. Mayer was particularly interested in Baroque and Rococo architecture and particularly the ways in which the use of materials and decoration in profusion created the impression of ethereality or formlessness. She wrote about such decoration, “Tracery and stucco can fill to bursting the spaces they occupy with motion in convoluted and subtle transitions between elasticity and rest.”

Midwinter Ghost was a Ghost connected to time and season, made on the occasion of the austral winter solstice, which occurred in 2023 in Auckland, New Zealand, on June 22. In Maori culture, this time of year also marks Matariki, the appearance in the sky of the Pleiades star cluster that ushers in the new year. Installed against a window, the work captured light as it changed throughout the day. It also created light, through the addition of small lamps installed in its center, which Mayer had used in one of her Ghosts. In the late afternoon, when the light started the fade, the lights were turned on, and the sculpture illuminated, becoming like a lantern or a candle.

The Hours was a new version of Mayer’s most ambitious and complex Ghost installation, which she made in 1981 for an exhibition at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and consisted of multiple sculptures. The title refers to the canonical hours, the Christian practice of dividing the day into times of prayer. This related to her Catholic upbringing and her interest in ways of marking time and its passage such as through diaries, calendars, and Medieval books of hours. The original installation consisted of four ghosts, with the names of the canonical hours written on the floor. Because of limited space, the new installation consisted of three. It connected to the exhibition’s theme of “Re-pair,” highlighting the way the Ghosts are in a state of being reconstituted or recomposed.

October Ghost was a new iteration of a Ghost Mayer had made for an exhibition called Dialogues at the alternative space Just Above Midtown Gallery (JAM) in the fall of 1980. For the exhibition at MoMA, which brought together artists and artworks connected to JAM’s history and exhibitions, , the Estate approached this Ghost as more of a reconstruction, studying the archival documentation of her original Ghost and aiming to recreate this as closely as possible. The exhibition highlighted the role of JAM in providing opurtunities for artists working outside of the mainstream, commercial art world, and particularly for women and artists of color, to not only exhibit work, but to experiment and collaborate. The Ghost that Mayer made for the exhibition at JAM was only the second she exhibited, and archival documentation shows how she used the opportunity to develop her ideas about the form and meaning of this work.

17^th Street Ghost was made for Mayer’s first solo exhibition at Gordon Robichaux Gallery, the first to focus on her body of work called Temporary Monuments. It connected to the gallery’s location along 17^th Street and the views and light from the gallery windows, which include the Empire State Building and the Metropolitan Life Tower. The Ghost captured the light coming in through the windows, which increased during the course of the exhibition period, as the days lengthened with the approach of the summer solstice.

In 2020, the Estate collaborated with artist Nick Mauss on the first posthumous iterations of the Ghosts, as part of his show at the Kunsthalle Basel entitled, Bizarre Silks, Private Imaginings and Narrative Facts, etc. The estate also worked with artist Ada Friedman on this process, which involved studying Mayer’s archival documentation of the sculptures and experimenting with different materials. The trio of sculptures made for this exhibition were titled February Ghosts (Monoceros, Auriga, and Orion) for the stars in the sky at the time of its installation, connecting to Mayer’s practice of naming Ghosts for constellations. Mauss wrote about this collaboration in his book Dispersed Events: Selected Writings.