RCA SoAH Presents: Carol Mavor, Serendipity: The Afterlife of the Object

This is a public event. Free admission but ticketed. Please sign up for a free ticket here. 

Mavor’s first ‘happy accident’ occurred in 1980 when visiting New York’s Serendipity 3, a dessert café favored by Andy Warhol. Mavor’s memory of eating a frozen hot chocolate became food for thought, nurturing accidental discoveries about art and literature.

This book’s happy, yet dark, accidents include finding Emily Dickinson’s poems, scribbled on salvaged envelopes, hidden in a drawer; Sally Mann’s wet-collodion photographs, touched by the angel of uncertainty; an audio diary left by Mavor’s own mother: and Lolita, rescued from incineration by Nabokov’s wife Véra.

Mavor’s writing is dependent on serendipity’s layers of happenstance, rousing feelings of something that she did not exactly know she was looking for until she found it. All history is about loss, and in the case of this book, much of it is tragic—but Serendipity also offers the happiness that can be found in unexpected discoveries.

In this lecture and book launch, Mavor will present an illustrated lecture on the book followed by a Q&A; after which there will be an opportunity to talk informally with a glass of wine, where books will be available for purchase.

Carol Mavor is an artist-historian, who began her career as an art-maker, performing on stage with her large-scale manipulable sculptures. Inspired by Lewis Carroll, she, too, played with fairy tales, the cult of the child, philosophy and language. Her Alice Malice performances gave way to writerly books with an eye on design and a celebration of the primacy of the art object: Pleasures Taken; Becoming; Reading Boyishly; Blue Mythologies; Black and Blue; Aurelia; Like a Lake and most recently Serendipity. All are ‘artist’s books’—all take creative and political risks. All seek to emote and provoke.