Mary Patten

Education: MFA, 1992, University of Illinois, Chicago. Exhibitions: Contemporary Art Museum Houston; Tufts University Art Galleries; Cooper Union; Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; VOX Populi; Interference Archive; Carnegie Mellon; Creative Time; Shedhalle, Zürich; New Museum; Chicago Cultural Center; Randolph St. Gallery. Film Festivals and Screenings: Rotterdam International; London Lesbian and Gay; Chicago Underground; MIX/NYC. Publications: Revolution as an eternal dream; Walls Turned Sideways; Art AIDS America Chicago; Lesbian Art in America; The Passionate Camera; Radical Teacher. Awards: Art for Justice and Rauschenberg Artist-as-Activist Fellowships (with Chicago Torture Justice Memorials); Artadia; Illinois Arts Council; NEA. Collaborations: CTJM, Feel Tank Chicago.

I am a visual artist, video-maker, writer, educator, occasional curator, and a long-time community and political activist. My interdisciplinary practice includes video, installation, writing, drawing, digital media, photography, small sculptures, and performance. In my studio work, collaborative projects, writing, and teaching, I address collisions and alignments between “politics” and art-making. The frailties of memory, speculative fiction, and the archive of the everyday are all evident in my “singular” work, where I claim authorship, fully aware that there are no wholly original ideas, that we are all shifting composites of one another.

For years, i have led or participated in many public collaborations and actions including Chicago Torture Justice Memorials, ACT UP Chicago, the Madame Binh Graphics Collective, and Feel Tank Chicago. I continue to be drawn to collective forms of cultural production to re-claim language, feeling, and political passions from fundamentalist thinking, and to reclaim a utopia of the everyday—a way of being together in the world that allows for anger, joy, and reparative visions. Sometimes working collaboratively means slipping under the radar, but that’s a risk worth taking.

My work proceeds from the belief that the “general public” is a myth, and that audiences are constituted through engagement with cultural forms which they in turn help shape. As a maker and a teacher, I am committed to experimental modes of participation and viewership, and in spaces–including the classroom and the teaching studio–that create incitements for active and inventive engagement with art beyond its traditional presentation. A productively symbiotic relationship connects my practice, research and teaching. “What is to be un-done,” an essay I wrote for Radical Teacher, draws from experiences teaching “Terrorism: a Media History,” a class I designed in 2002. “Feeling in Real Time,” another interdisciplinary seminar, emerged in part from work and writing with Feel Tank Chicago, and our immersion into affective politics and the politics of affect. The class is also deeply engaged with a practice of “immanent writing,” touching feelings that emerge from a collective experience of watching films together in the dark.

Hokey Sapp Does SPEW
Panel