“Mayer’s diary entries offer a refreshingly unromanticized account of downtown New York in the 1970s, with her art practice forced to fit uncomfortably within a larger to-do list. A typical sequence reads: “The last of the T paper. I thought abt. the drawings I want to do.” She used those drawings to plan her fabric sculptures, wielding that doubted grandeur to complicated ends: the sculptures float (but not without being lifted) and cascade (but not without bearing weight). Just a year later, Mayer would become one of the founding members of the all-female cooperative A.I.R. Gallery, a milestone her diary hints at when Lucy Lippard stops by for a stressful studio visit. But in 1971, Mayer had yet to find her community. Her social and intellectual life was confined to close friends, and she often set up an internal fight between confidence in her work and the egotism of wanting to become famous.”