Mary Patten

Mary Patten is a visual artist, video-maker, writer, educator, occasional curator, and a long-time community and political activist. Her work crosses and combines video installation, drawing, photography, single-channel video, performance, artists’ books, and large-scale collaborative projects. Her practice is fueled by the desire to address collisions as well as alignments between politics and art-making. She is drawn to collective forms of cultural production in order to recover 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.

Patten has shown work throughout the US and Europe, including at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago Cultural Center, Cooper Union, Contemporary Art Museum Houston, Tufts University Aidekman Arts Center, Creative Time with Feel Tank Chicago, Randolph Street Gallery, Shedhalle Zurich, and Kunstverein und Kunsthaus Hamburg. Her films have been screened at International Film Festival Rotterdam, Visual AIDS, Chicago Underground, Artists Space, MIX NYC, and London Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. She has received awards from the Illinois Art Council, Artadia, and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the Robert Rauschenberg Artist-as-Activist Fellowship and an Art for Justice Grant with Chicago Torture Justice Memorials, both with collaborators.