Amy Tobin is Associate Professor in the Department of History of Art, University of Cambridge and Curator, contemporary programmes at Kettle’s Yard, the University’s modern and contemporary art gallery. She is also Fellow and Director of Studies in History of Art of Newnham College, Cambridge. She has curated numerous exhibitions at Kettle’s Yard including Linderism and Making New Worlds: Li Yuan-chia & Friends. In 2023, she published a major article on the artist Candace Hill-Montgomery in Art History as well as her first monograph Women Artists Together: Art in the Age of Women’s Liberation with Yale University Press.

Abstract
This paper focuses on the American artist Rosemary Mayer’s time in Rome, part of an extended research trip to Europe in 1975 during which she pursued her twofold interests in pre-nineteenth century histories of women and Mannerist and Rococo art. Working across many media, Mayer is associated with her post-minimal experiments in abstract painterly objects, often made from diaphanous textiles and tensile structures, named for figures tangential to history. This body of work developed in close relation to the women’s art movement in the US but was deeply informed by Mayer’s preoccupations with metaphysical questions of being and belonging. She felt a particular kinship with the artist Jacopo da Pontormo and while on her trip to Europe began to translate Pontormo’s 1554–56 diary, produced while he was working on the San Lorenzo commission in Florence, as well as an artist book Passages, which condenses her research into a new theogony.
I consider Mayer’s journey to Europe and especially her time in Rome as a conscious misalignment with the critical terms of the New York art world. Rather than understand this as a retreat, I see her research as a mode of refusal of the terms of cultural feminism and an assertion of the value of historical artistic experiment for understanding ontological contingency from a feminist perspective. This paper is part of a larger project I am scoping, which considers Mayer’s work in relation to other American artists who made journeys into Europe and Rome, to hone their practice, and bring their feminism into the heart of art’s histories. These include Ana Mendieta, Carolee Schneemann and Francesca Woodman.