Mary Patten is a visual artist, video-maker, writer, educator, and long-time political activist. For years, Patten has led or participated in many public collaborations and actions including Chicago Torture Justice Memorials, ACT UP Chicago, the Madame Binh Graphics Collective, Feel Tank Chicago, Artists’ Call Against Intervention in Central America and the Caribbean, and community mural-making. Patten has exhibited and screened work for over forty years in artist-run, experimental, and alternative spaces, museums, and international film / video festivals, including the Brooklyn Museum, Contemporary Art Museum / Houston, Tufts University Art Galleries, Cooper Union, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, threewalls, Interference Archive, VOX Populi, Shedhalle / Zürich, Chicago Cultural Center, Randolph St. Gallery, Creative Time (with Feel Tank Chicago), Fales Special Collections at NYU, the New Museum, University of Memphis Art Museum, Kunstverein and Kunsthaus (Hamburg), Rotterdam International Film Festival, London and Hong Kong Lesbian and Gay Film Festivals, MIX/NYC, Women in the Director’s Chair, and the Gene Siskel Film Center. Writings include Revolution as an Eternal Dream: the exemplary failure of the Madame Binh Graphics Collective, and visual essays for Art AIDS America Chicago, The Passionate Camera, Radical Teacher, and WhiteWalls.
As part of Chicago Torture Justice Memorials, Patten received a grant from the Arts for Justice Fund and an “Artist as Activist” fellowship from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. Patten has also been awarded many individual artist grants, fellowships, and residencies, including Artadia, 3Arts, the Illinois Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Camargo Foundation. Patten is Professor Emeritus at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago after teaching in the Film, Video, New Media, and Animation Department for 31 years.
Patten’s work crosses poetry and politics, manifesting as video installation, drawing, single-channel video, mixed media, and printmaking, and is fueled by the desire to address collisions as well as alignments between politics and art-making. Patten is an activist as well as an artist, with life-long commitments to anti-imperialist organizing, movements for racial justice, against the carceral state, to fight the AIDS epidemic, and for queer and LGBTQ liberation. Patten is drawn to collective forms of cultural production “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. Sometimes working collaboratively means slipping under the radar, but that’s a risk worth taking.”
Patten says: “I struggle to balance a kind of ‘schizo-vision’ between my ability to drift and make art while people and other life-forms are starving or burning on some border. These are intense and awful times, full of deadly reports from Gaza, Sudan, and so many other ‘elsewheres.’ Language turns things upside down and inside out. My own ‘safety’ and ‘comfort’ is contingent upon whole peoples being reduced to bare life. i want my art to chip away at the refusal to look, to allow voices to be heard and listened to instead of being reduced to background noise.”
