Imaginary Conversations with Mary Overlie
On the passing of a mentor and how art lives after dying
NOTES FROM MARY’S ZOOM MEMORIAL, January 16, 2021
Hello, Rosemary, Steve, Wendell, Paul, Lisa, Kevin, Catherine, Terry, Raina.3 All my teachers…these faces are 15 years older, and in mourning. Can they see me crying? I’ll just turn my camera off.
“Mary collected Capricorns.” (I didn’t know that! I am a Capricorn.) I cling to this like I cling to when she asked how old Jeff, Sam, and I were. “40 is a beautiful time… full professionalhood.”
In studio. In school, that’s what we called work time. In studio, if we wanted to watch a video of our work, we would roll a giant TV on an AV cart into the room. She showed me video of myself in a class improvisation: “I’m trying to understand how you disappeared for so long and then— Pop! You popped up right in the middle of this cluster of bodies! Where did you come from?”
In the last year of school, we finally got to sit in her office and talk about Time and Space for two hours. Then we reenacted that conversation in a Chairs/Unnecessary score on ETW “Share Day.” I thought, “This is what I always dreamed college would be.”
Mary and Wendell and Paul did this improvisation not long after 9/11, at Judson I think. I remember knowing how lucky we were to see them dance together, these long-time collaborators. They wore these cardboard hats, in the shape of other major buildings in our skyline. And I cried and cried. Because it was like these buildings in mourning for their two lost friends.