On a ninety-degree September afternoon, I took the elevator up to Gordon Robichaux, rising high up off the stinking pavement to see Proserpina / Devil Chaser, an exhibition that pairs artist friends Rosemary Mayer and Ree Morton. By the time I reached the gallery door, New York City seemed to have sunk down, a dense, scorching mass seething far below me. Inside the gallery, the voices of Morton and Mayer waver from the walls like smoke from thick wax candles. There are words everywhere, meeting you at the door, then curling, floating, hovering, appearing suddenly in your internal space as you silently recite them. Morton and Mayer’s artistic kinship seems to have nurtured the weird poetry in each of them, which comes together in works that are by turns hilarious and mournful, gossamer and grotesque, leafy and blighted, all unfolding according to their own interior logic.
Both artists have a startling capacity to combine glib observation with guttural emotion, but they move in different, strangely synchronized directions to get there. Morton preferred dense, crude forms, hardened fabrics, and slabs of wood, using humor and conventionally feminine shapes (bows, flowers, ribbons) and delicate articulations (tendrils, coils, crescents) to loosen their weight and bluntness. Mayer’s forms are airy, delicate conjurations of flowers, balloons, words, and curtained openings carrying a density that emerges slowly; ideas hefty with feeling precipitate out of smoke.
The first artwork I encountered was a goldenrod-colored banner with a black and green butterfly patched askew at its center. Moving in an erratic flight pattern, the letters R-O-S-E-M-A-R-Y are sewn around the stained yellow surface. This “Rosemary flag” had flown in Morton’s 1975 installation Something in the Wind, where she strung flags onto the mast of a historic ship in the South Street Seaport. Each flag paired the name of a friend with an image of something airborne (a butterfly, a cloud, a bird). I imagined the flags in a gale lifting, snapping, folding over themselves, their separate shapes gathering into one great wing sweeping the sea. “I made a flag for each person in my life that I have good feelings for,” Morton said. “It was a celebration for them, and a means of identifying and locating myself in the world by naming the persons who surrounded me.”
In April 1978, in answer to Morton’s flags, Mayer made Some Days in April, tethering seven giant advertising balloons with ribbons to stakes in a field in upstate New York. Documentation of this work is on display, including a handwritten page from an artist’s book where Mayer recounts Morton’s life and death, with particular attention paid to her love of botanical folklore, a theme that runs loosely throughout the exhibition. Each balloon in Mayer’s piece carried the name of someone connected to April—the month in which her parents, who had both died when she was a teenager, had been born, and the month in which Morton had died the year before—along with a date, the name of a spring flower, and a star visible in the sky at that time. Mayer also included French nun Marie-Euphrasie Pelletier, whose feast day and beatification both occurred in April. A social reformer, Pelletier established shelters for women rejected by society.
In 1956, Helen Marie “Ree” Reilly left her nursing studies and married Ted Morton, a naval officer. The couple moved frequently with his postings, eventually settling in Jacksonville, Florida, where Morton raised their three children. There, she happened upon a television advertisement for a free evening art class at the Jacksonville Museum. She went that night and signed up. Morton eventually decided to leave her husband and pursue art full time, moving with her children to Philadelphia to attend the Tyler School of Art and Architecture, where she received an MFA in 1970. Two years later, Morton moved to New York to pursue her work, while her children went to live with their father. In 1976, a year before the car crash that would take her life, Morton described herself in a grant application as a “feminist classic: out of the kitchen, into the studio.” In the same application, she wrote, “I figured out that life matters, too, and that being an artist is better than being a nurse. Not bad, for a girl.”
Rosemary Mayer was born in 1943 in Ridgewood, Queens. Mayer initially studied classics, Greek, and Latin before turning to visual art. By the late 1960s, she had entered New York’s experimental art scene, becoming involved with 0 to 9, a journal edited by her sister, the poet Bernadette Mayer, and Vito Acconci, to whom Rosemary was briefly married (“I don’t know why,” Bernadette later recalled). By 1971, at twenty-eight, Mayer was living alone in New York, trying to figure out how to make a life as an artist. Her journal from that year records her thoughts on money and its absence, sex, loneliness, ambition, friendship, lovers, cigarettes, art, and the desire to be taken seriously. That same year, she began attending a women’s consciousness-raising group, where she wrestled with questions about women’s lives and artistic labor. In 1972, Mayer became a founding member of A.I.R. Gallery, the first cooperative gallery for women artists in the United States, and exhibited in one of its earliest shows. She befriended Morton around the same time.
Morton’s sculpture Devil Chaser (1975), made with wire, enamel, celastic, wood, and fabric, sits on a green wooden rectangle on the floor. Looping whorls of ribbon shoot sideways from the base into intestinal or tongue-shaped curls that unfurl into red, blue, and yellow bows. From one end, red strips dangle like monstrous eyelashes or bloody cilia. Next to the form is a re-creation of one of Morton’s lost plaques from 1975 that lists the sculpture’s possible uses: “TO REVEAL THE PRESENCE OF WITCHES,” “TO WARD OFF DESTRUCTION BY LIGHTNING,” “TO CURE DEMONIACS.” Morton had encountered descriptions of St John’s wort, also called “devil chaser,” in a nineteenth-century plant book, where its bright yellow flowers are ascribed various protective powers against evil. She transcribed the entry into one of her notebooks and added, “You never know when you might need one.” The sculpture acts as a talisman, its grotesque, ribboned appendages suggesting that protection against unseen horrors requires a figure as disturbing as the forces it seeks to repel.
In the show’s title, Devil Chaser is paired with Mayer’s sculpture Proserpina (1975), which is installed in an adjoining space. Devil Chaser and Proserpina both bring flowers into proximity with demons, witches, and the underworld. Where Morton’s Devil Chaser offers a botanical charm against potential malefic forces, Mayer’s Proserpina begins after those forces have already arrived. The sculpture rises from a white plinth like a strange grouping of calla lilies drawn upward from the fires of hell. Made from wood, aluminum, fiberglass, and oil paint, its form spirals, a tangle of silver wire and red netting that flares and curls around itself. From the fiery mass, yellow wooden dowels rise like strange skeletal stalks. The work has a sense of continual movement—of something twisting upward, escaping its own enclosure, or transforming it—suspended between flower and fire.
The Roman goddess Proserpina is nearly identical to the Greek goddess Persephone. While out gathering flowers, Proserpina is seized by Pluto, god of wealth and hell. Ovid describes her in his Metamorphoses as burning “with a fierce desire to gather flowers. Now she fills with the spoil of the fields her laughing baskets. … now she twines a wreath of flowers and crowns herself therewith, little seeing in this a foreshadowing of the marriage fate holds in store for her.” Pluto then appears on his blood-dripping horse, staining the fields as he violently abducts her to his underworld, where she is forced to marry him. Ceres, goddess of agriculture, searches wildly for her daughter, and in her grief the world begins to darken, crops fail, and the air grows cold. Ceres pleads with Jupiter, who strikes a deal with Pluto that Proserpina may return each year in spring and summer but must descend again into the underworld for the remaining months. There is no warding off evil here, only the possibility of escaping hell, and even then, only some of the time.
Mayer’s flower drawings, where blooms become emblems of renewal and the possibility of return, are more hopeful. In three of her ink and watercolor works, delicately rendered flowers accompany neatly lettered phrases. The words—“HARMLESS DAYS,” “AS SAFE AS HOUSES,” “NOW WITH A WHOLE SKIN”—read like part incantation, part promise, suggesting that language itself might be arranged to offer sanctuary and healing. Nearby, Morton’s paintings GESTURES and ATMOSPHERE, from her 1976 series Signs of Love, feature single words curling in dense black script across pastel-colored plywood, their forms looping like skywriting. With nothing more than letters and a wash of color, Morton creates worlds out of the barest materials; the words seem to float free of their surfaces and drift into the surrounding air, laughing.
Throughout the show, Mayer and Morton summon both freedom and the safety to inhabit it, making art into a form of sheltering magic and friendship into a place for unguarded personal excavations. It feels especially fitting that the show is presented at Gordon Robichaux, an artist-run gallery—a kind of space that is precarious by nature, sustained through tremendous effort and camaraderie, yet capable of creating the conditions for fragile, experimental forms of relationship to emerge that might otherwise never take root. The intimacy of the gallery allows Mayer and Morton’s connection to stay poetic, loose, and idiosyncratic, without forcing them into a clean argument or resolving the peculiarities of their affinities. The presentation is deeply loving, a feeling amplified by the tender exhibition essay written by Marie Warsh, Mayer’s niece. Writing about Morton’s Devil Chaser, Warsh describes the sculpture as evoking a garden, “an enclosed, idealized space protected from the outside world.” The phrase might also describe what Mayer and Morton made for each other, and what this exhibition briefly makes possible for its visitors.
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