It has been a great pleasure to bring another member of the Mailer family to the Norman Mailer Society. We always have Mailers at our meetings. Over the past few years, as you know, we’ve been asking a different family member to come every year. This will keep going for a long time, we hope. By the time we’re done, we can begin again. This year our speaker, like her father, is an artist, and she has been an artist for longer than any of her other siblings. I believe that’s the case. Isn’t it, Danielle? Yes. She’s been a painter and a sculptor for decades, although if you look at her, you can see she looks to be about twenty-eight. For many years, whenever she was recognized in the art community — and she’s been recognized many times, articles in Art Forum and a lot of other art magazines — invariably, her father’s name would be mentioned. You know how the journalistic mind works. The first paragraph had an obligatory sentence saying that Danielle Mailer was the daughter of the literary lion, Norman Mailer. And then there’d be mention of his Pulitzer-Prize winning books and so forth. But over the last few years this has changed because of her many exhibitions, and other achievements, including major commissions — outdoor sculptures for museums and libraries. She just had an exhibit outside the New York Public Library. Her ship has come in, and she has reached a plateau of eminence; people in the art world know who she is and talk about her all the time. I should add that Danielle is not just a visual artist, as I learned several years ago after her father’s death when she wrote something about him. She’s also a verbal artist. She chose to go into painting and sculpture, but she could very well have been a writer. It is with great pleasure that I ask you to welcome Danielle Mailer.
— J. Michael Lennon, Keynote introduction
In honor of Norman, I would like to begin by uttering the words my father often used when first addressing his audience: “Can you hear me in the back?”