Grace M. Mayer

Grace M. Mayer (November 26, 1901 – December 21, 1996) was a curator of photography for the Museum of the City of New York and for the Museum of Modern Art.

Early life Mayer was born in the Hotel Sevilla, 58th Street, in New York City. Her father was an investment banker and she was privately educated at the Ethical Culture School and the Seabury School, both in New York City. As a teenager she was privately tutored in Europe for two years, and attended one semester at Columbia University. She joined the Red Cross as a nurse's aide during World War I, at Roosevelt Hospital. Despite her wealth, she subsequently sought a career for herself. She was Executive Secretary to Dr. Leo Kessel (1881–1932) at Mount Sinai Hospital where she organized the follow-up clinic for Graves' disease patients,

Over three decades at the museum she organized about 150 exhibitions, presenting New York at the turn of the century, for which Edward Steichen wrote the foreword. then In 1961 as Associate Curator and, in 1962, John Szarkowski appointed her as Curator of the department, organising the inaugural show in MoMA's first photography-collection galleries, which opened in 1964. She collaborated with Steichen on important shows such as The Sense of Abstraction (1960), Steichen the Photographer (1961) for which she wrote the biographical outline, and the introduction to The Bitter Years: 1935-1941 (1962), both published by the Museum of Modern Art.

Other exhibitions curated by Mayer

Source:

Recent Acquisitions (1961) A Bid For Space (4 installations, 1960 to 1963) Diogenes with a Camera V (1961) Photographs by Harry Callahan and Robert Frank (1962) Walker Evans: American Photographs (1962) Ernst Haas: Color Photography (1962)

Mayer wrote articles in the Bulletin of the Museum of the City of New York and in Antiques, Contemporary Photographer, Aperture and Audience.

She was a member of the Advisory Council of the Village Art Center and a director of the Print Council of America. a voluntary position. She donated photographs she personally collected to the Museum of Modern Art where they are archived with her written records.

In 1997, the year after she died, Peter Galassi installed From the Grace M. Mayer Collection, at the Museum; a selection of 35 works from the group she left to the museum, mostly of gifts from photographer friends, including Abbott, Steichen, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Harry Callahan, Paul Caponigro, Roy DeCarava, Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Helen Levitt, Nathan Lyons, Aaron Siskind, W. Eugene Smith, Paul Strand, Todd Webb and Minor White, as well as lithographs by Toulouse-Lautrec.