The work of Mary Ellen Carroll engages the disciplines of architecture, public policy, film/media, and technology. Carroll’s oeuvre spans more than four decades in a range of media that transcend genres to investigate a single, fundamental question: What do we consider to be a work of art? It is dedicated to a social and political critique that explores the interactions of subjectivity, language, power, and knowledge. Often operating in real time and in public view, their practice, which unfolds through law, architecture, and lived systems, embraces uncertainty, risk, and contradiction as generative conditions. How To Talk Dirty and Influence People offers a comprehensive overview of Carroll’s work since the 1980s. Bringing together images of discrete objects, performance documentation, new critical essays, commissioned prose and poetry, and conversations with the artist, this publication presents the work of an artist who insists that humor, negotiation, and persistence are powerful tools for reshaping social reality.
“As with every work, there is one fundamental question: What do we consider to be a work of art? This is followed by a problem or question that needs to be solved and then sets in motion the dialectical process necessary to find a solution.”
—Mary Ellen Carroll, conversation with David Joselit
Mary Ellen Carroll is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including from the American Academy in Berlin, Anonymous Was A Woman, the Graham Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the American Academy in Rome. Carroll received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1989), where they studied time-based arts, filmmaking, and architectural history, and earned a BS from the University of Colorado, Boulder. Teaching, lecturing, and public presentations on architecture, art, and public policy are an important part of Carroll’s work and have taken place at Dia Art Foundation, Columbia University, the American Academy in Berlin, Rice University, and Yale University, among other venues. Carroll’s work is in numerous public and private collections in the United States and internationally and has been exhibited at institutions including Alserkal Avenue, Dubai; the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery at Columbia University, New York; Busan Biennial, Busan, South Korea; Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; the Institute of Contemporary Art, London; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; the Johann Jacobs Museum, Zurich; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; MoMA PS1, Long Island City, New York; the Museum für Völkerkunde, Munich; Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (mumok), Vienna; Prospect.3, New Orleans; the Renaissance Society, Chicago; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Mary Ellen Carroll: How To Talk Dirty and Influence People is the first major solo museum exhibition of the artist’s work.
