The work of Chicago-based artist and activist Mary Patten operates between the realms of poetry and politics, posing expansive questions drawn from a life deeply engaged with social and political movements. In a program wryly titled after a truncated quote by Che Guevara, she presents a selection of readings and videos spanning from the mid-1990s to the present. These include video essays, diaries, and documentation of the fight against the AIDS epidemic, struggles to free political prisoners, and anti-imperialist movements. Often assembled from the fragments of everyday life—newspaper clippings, letters, snapshots, half-remembered conversations, found objects, and other ephemera—these works embody Patten’s project to face as well as fictionalize her “checkered biography” and its contradictory entanglements between the call to respond to political urgencies and the desire to live an “artist’s life.”
Followed by a conversation with Mary Patten.
1994–2025, USA
Format: Digital
In English
75 minutes followed by discussion.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Mary Patten is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, educator, and long-time community and political activist. Her work in video installation, drawing, photography, single-channel video, performance, artists’ books, and large-scale collaborative projects is fueled by the desire to address collisions as well as alignments between politics and art-making. Patten’s work has been exhibited throughout North America and Europe, including at the Brooklyn Museum; Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; Cooper Union, New York; Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York; Creative Time (with Feel Tank Chicago); Randolph Street Gallery; New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Chicago Cultural Center; Shedhalle, Zurich; and Kunstverein und Kunsthaus Hamburg. Her films have been screened at the International Film Festival Rotterdam; Visual AIDS; Chicago Underground Film Festival; Artists Space, New York; MIX NYC; the BFI Flare: London LGBTIQ+ Film Festival (formerly the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival); and the Hong Kong Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. She has received awards from the Illinois Art Council, Artadia, and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as a Robert Rauschenberg Artist-as-Activist Fellowship and an Art for Justice Grant with Chicago Torture Justice Memorials. In addition to her individual studio practice, Patten has led or participated in many public cultural collaborations including Chicago Torture Justice Memorials, Feel Tank Chicago, ACT UP, the Madame Binh Graphics Collective, and Artists’ Call Against Intervention in Central America and the Caribbean.
ACCESSIBILITY
Conversations at the Edge events have live captions (CART). The Gene Siskel Film Center is fully ADA accessible and its theaters are equipped with hearing loops. For other accessibility requests, please visit saic.edu/access or write cate@saic.edu.