PRESS RELEASE

Anthony Meier is pleased to present Consider the Oyster, a group exhibition—on view from May 29 to August 8, 2025— bringing together a constellation of visionary female artists whose practices echo, reinterpret, and extend the enduring legacy of American writer M.F.K. Fisher (1908-1992)—who, over six decades and fifteen books, transformed food writing from a domestic aside into a profound, poetic medium through which to explore the complexity of human experience. 

Titled after Fisher’s 1941 publication Consider the Oyster, this exhibition features work across textile, painting, photography, and sculpture by artists who share Fisher’s instinct to excavate the overlooked and elevate the everyday. Their practices defy convention, delving into intimacy, ritual, and transformation to reveal what lies beneath the surface of ordinary materials and moments, and in doing so, expand the possibilities for how we see, feel, and move through the world. Featured artists include 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). 

Fisher, a genre-defining Californian writer, rejected the gendered conventions of mid-century food writing. Instead, she used food as a lens to explore emotion, identity, sensuality, and place, forging a literary voice that was intellectually rigorous, emotionally honest, and unapologetically her own. For Fisher, to write about eating was to write about life, with her essays traversing deeper philosophies of pleasure, desire, and resilience. Writing from California, France, and Switzerland, Fisher introduced American readers to a continental sensibility while laying the groundwork for new ways of being and becoming, particularly as a woman navigating the world on her own terms. 

The fourteen artists in Consider the Oyster extend Fisher’s legacy through works that transform the everyday into a site of inquiry and revelation. Here, the oyster, both aphrodisiac and armor, emerges as a symbol of metamorphosis, embodying the latent depths and generative processes at the heart of both art and life.

Excavating the everyday, a quiet gesture of care anchors a painting by Emma Amos (b. 1937, Atlanta, GA) an artist and activist who brought the lived experience of Black women to the forefront. A young woman, pitcher in hand, is depicted in a radical moment of leisure and care. A similar reverence infuses the paper sculptures of Bay Area artist and educator Libby Black (b. 1976, Toledo, OH), who constructs meticulous replicas of books entirely from paper and glue, then hand-paints their covers to resemble the originals: M.F.K. Fisher’s Consider the Oyster (1941) and Alice B. Toklas’s The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook (1954). Like Fisher and Toklas, whose writing reframed domestic life as a site of intellect, pleasure, and resistance, Black’s sculptural practice transforms everyday objects into vessels of personal narrative and cultural critique.

Chronicling metamorphosis and change, lens-based artist Tabitha Soren (b. 1967, San Antonio, TX) stretches the photographic medium by probing its surface through sculptural and painterly interventions. By emphasizing the instability of photographic truth, the artist seeks to reveal the underlying emotional and psychological states of her subjects, extending the possibilities of her format and our own recognition. Meanwhile, Los Angeles-based mixed media artist Teresa Baker (b. 1985, Watford City, ND) creates abstracted landscapes through a mixed media practice that fuses natural and synthetic materials, inviting reflection on how we move through and perceive space. Her compositions—shaped by texture, color, and form—are deeply informed by her Mandan/Hidatsa heritage, which guides her material choices and spatial sensibilities. Through this process, Baker imbues otherwise ordinary materials with cultural meaning, layering personal and collective memory into each work.

Textile—long tied to womanhood, labor, and legacy—further anchors the exhibition’s material investigations. A quilt by Rosie Lee Tompkins (b. 1936, Arkansas), who is widely regarded as one of the most visionary American quiltmakers, pulses with the artist’s signature radical forms and unrestrained compositions. Her transformative approach—one that redefined both textile and contemporary art—continues in the work of Bay Area artist and educator Terri Friedman (b. 1964, Colorado), who approaches the loom as a painter does a canvas. Having come to textiles later in her practice, Friedman creates large-scale weavings shaped by a painter’s sensitivity to color and form, each work layered with texture, rhythm, and intuition. 

Extending this lineage to the digital age, San Francisco artist Rel Robinson (b. 1995, Los Angeles, CA) merges historical material culture with emerging technologies. Her quilted velvet works layer AI-generated imagery—such as Corinthian columns and Tiffany lamps—with scans from early 20th-century interior design catalogs. Velvet, a fabric historically tied to opulence and power, becomes a medium where beauty and critique collide. The works evoke a shared visual memory, oscillating between nostalgia and immediacy, between the ornamental and the deeply personal. Drawing a direct line from the Jacquard loom to her hybrid process, where stitching and digital generation converge, Robinson’s practice challenges the relationship between aesthetics, memory, and power. 

When first published in 1941, Consider the Oyster redefined the humble mollusc into a symbol of contradiction and complexity, providing a new lens through which to view life itself. In this exhibition, Fisher’s groundbreaking, subversive legacy is honored and extended, as new generations of artists continue to challenge, reveal, and unsettle the very world we inhabit.