Named in the essence of a 1941 quote by writer MFK Fisher, Consider the Oyster, presented at Anthony Meier and co-curated by Kristin Delzell and Lauren Ryan, gathers moments of the mundane, the domestic, the visceral, and the sensorial across a range of works by female artists. While their pieces, like Fisher’s own work, draw a similar surreal and gentle connection between the everyday and its intangible, subjective complexities, it is the rich interior experiences of the exhibiting artists that further echo Fisher’s own poetic interpretation of otherwise ordinary life and its materials.
MFK Fisher was a twentieth-century genre-defying female writer widely recognized for her expansive writing on food, cooking, and sensorial experience. Viewers are greeted with her words upon entering the gallery. While one quote by the author faces outward to the public on a gallery window, one lives by the gallery’s entryway, between the title and the artist list, reading, “The oyster leads a dreadful but exciting life. Indeed, his chance to live at all is slim, and if he should survive the arrows of his own outrageous fortune and in the two weeks of his carefree youth find a clean smooth place to fix on, the years afterwards are full of stress, passion, and danger.” This quote is pulled directly from Fisher’s book, Consider the Oyster. In Fisher’s work, the senses and food transcend their material or nutritional character, becoming glinting pathways to access the everyday as a site of consideration, expression, and sensuality. Fisher alchemizes the ordinariness of something as vital to us as food, both seeing it as a source of beauty, nurture, desire, and pleasure, and often using it as a means of exploring other deeper, and sometimes taboo facets of life.
The exhibition boasts an impressive list of both living and deceased artists including; Emma Amos (1937–2020), Ruth Asawa (1926–2013), Teresa Baker, Libby Black, Carol Bove, Tracey Emin, Terri Friedman, Yayoi Kusama, Nan Montgomery, Soumya Netrabile, Rel Robinson, Daisy Sheff, Tabitha Soren, and Rosie Lee Tompkins (1936–2006). Each living artist either produced a new work inspired by Fisher’s words, like Libby Black’s replica of the namesake, original 1941 copy of Consider the Oyster, in Black’s signature aesthetic and handwriting, or pulled an existing work from their oeuvre that aligned with the sensual/sensorial and quotidian flavor of Fisher’s work.
Consider the Oyster also includes works by a number of female artists who lived and worked around the time MFK Fisher was most actively writing and publishing (although she continued her practice well into her seventies and eighties). This includes artists like Ruth Asawa, Emma Amos, and Rosie Lee Tompkins. Significantly, these women were also mothers and working creatives, much like Fisher herself, and express the same kind of inquisitiveness within the everyday and its scenes as Fisher. A number of the more hyper-contemporary participating artists, such as Teresa Baker, also share the lived experience of being a working artist and mother. Her 2024 work, Steady, combines both natural and synthetic materials, such as animal hide and astroturf, reflecting both a veneration for culturally significant materials as well as a demonstrable practicality in employing what is readily available. This material synthesis of practical sensibility and cultural memory represents the kind of rhythmic relationship between life and creative practice, and how it appears in our materials.
I’d like to imagine that Fisher’s work also draws inspiration from the richly abundant natural and culinary landscape of California, as she had significant connections to Napa and Southern California. In the same flavor, the artists of her time, based in California, like Asawa and Tompkins, bring a distinctly West Coast aesthetic to the exhibition, capturing the familiar quality of light and natural forms of the landscape.
While Consider the Oyster, the exhibition, loosely references the rather threadbare material and conceptual theme of exploring feminist perspectives on “women’s work,” the artists’ monumentalizing complication of objects and everyday experiences is what truly captivated my attention. Positioning natural objects as sites of reverence requires attention and fosters a process of looking again. The sensorial encounter produced in the gallery space then adds to the layered perspectives on display. The exhibition offers a range of voices, materials, and perspectives from which to consider the everyday and its artifacts, demonstrating an evergreen dialogue about our relationship to what makes up our lives. It asks: when we consider the oyster, what comes of it?
Consider the Oyster
Anthony Meier, Mill Valley, CA
May 28, 2025 to August 8, 2025