Milkweed Smithereens

An avant-gardist with a taste for Classics, a downtown poet who is unafraid of venerable forms such as the sonnet, Bernadette Mayer, born in Brooklyn in 1945, has long been adept at a kind of casually intimate conceptualism. The most celebrated example: her text-and-photo installation Memory. In July 1971, Mayer shot a roll a day of 35mm Kodachrome (“I literally, physically hated the other films”), and the following year exhibited 1,116 color prints, her handwritten notes, and a somewhat muffled recording of the artist-poet reading from the month’s journals.