El Tendedero Indiana Collection

Monica Mayer (b. 1954) is a Mexican-born artist, educator, and activist. Mayer initially received training in visual art at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. She is best known for public actions and installation artworks, but the artist also produced collages, drawings, and published books and essays. Mayer’s work exists within a tradition of installation art, performance, and political intervention identified by Mexican theorist Juan Acha as no-objectualismo or non-objectual art. No-objectualismo is associated with international conceptual art movements like Situationism, Happenings in New York and other cities, and the work of Japanese groups like Gutai and Group Ultra Niigata, but arises from socio-political and critical contexts particular to Mexico and Latin America. The movement was best represented by the work of avant-garde performance and conceptual art groups known collectively as Los Grupos and pursued individually by members of Los Grupos and by artists like Mayer. From the 1970s onward, Mayer was also involved in feminist artmaking and advocacy through her participation in groups like Movimiento Feminista Mexicano, the Coalición de Mujeres Feministas, and Collectivo Cine Mujeres. Mobilized in part by the United Nations International Women’s Year, the main conference of which was held in Mexico City in 1975, Mayer began staging art installations with more explicit feminist rhetoric. Mayer continued to explore the role of art in the feminist political project during a two-year program at the Feminist Studio Workshop in Los Angeles’ Women’s Building, an interdisciplinary center for feminist art practices founded by Judy Chicago, Arlene Raven, and Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, during which she made return trips to Mexico in order to lead workshops for women artists. In 1980, Mayer completed a master’s degree in the sociology of art at Goddard College in Vermont. Her thesis on the importance of feminist art as a tool for political organizing drew heavily from her work in Los Angeles. In 1983, Monica Mayer partner with Maris Bustamente, a long-time Mexican conceptual artist and member of the avant-garde performance art group No Grupo, to form Polvo de Gallina Negra (or Black Hen Powder), the first of Los Grupos to include the advancement of women’s issues in it’s stated mission. Polvo de Gallina Negra staged political interventions, media appearances, and conceptual works from 1983 to 1999. Mayer is perhaps best known for a serial installation piece known as El Tendedero (the Clothesline). El Tendedero was first staged at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City in 1978. For El Tendedero, Mayer solicits responses to a series of questions from women in local communities (e.g. “As a woman, have you ever experienced violence or harassment?” or “Do you feel safe as a woman in your city?”), and displays the responses en masse hanging from a clothesline to raise awareness of the frequency of gendered violence and harassment in different cities. The artwork has been reactivated several times since Mayer’s relocation to the United States in 1978, including at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in 2017-8 and, most recently, at locations around Indianapolis in 2020.

Women4Change Indiana is an inclusive, non-partisan, grassroots organization that promotes the health, safety, and respect of all Hoosiers. The organization is based in Indianapolis and was created in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election.