Bust is an integral part of Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler’s double-sided, 30-minute film installation Flora (see also Collections Online for M.2019.29), which spotlights the life of Flora Mayo, a previously unknown American artist with whom the renowned Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti had a love affair while she was studying in Paris in the 1920s. Mayo is mentioned only fleetingly in the widely disseminated Giacometti biography by James Lord, first published in 1985 , in which Lord ignored her identity as an artist. A 1927 photo of the two artists together in Paris, flanking a portrait bust by Mayo of Giacometti, sparked Hubbard / Birchler’s curiosity and subsequent detective work to locate any trail of her life and art and restore her to history. Bust, is a reconstruction of the now-lost sculpture that Mayo created of Giacometti and a photographic reproduction of the faded image published in Lord’s biography of Giacometti. Bust stands as a testament to the work that Mayo created during her years in Paris; by exhibiting the recreation of her sculpture alongside their film, Hubbard / Birchler call attention to Mayo’s artistic practice and the poignancy of her work that no longer exists.The artists bring Mayo’s compelling biography to life through a feminist perspective that interweaves reconstruction, reenactment, and documentary into a hybrid form of storytelling.
