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Mary Patten: At The Risk Of Seeming Ridiculous
Thursday, May 1, 6:00 p.m. CT
Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State St.
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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 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.
Portrait of the Artist: Mary Patten [Article]
Jason Foumberg | New City | February 11, 2013
Mary Patten Remembers ‘Schizo Culture’ [Article]
Daniel Orendorff | Art In America | January 30, 2013
What Is To Be (Un)Done: Notes on Teaching Art and Terrorism [Article]
Mary Patten | The Radical Teacher No. 89 | Winter 2010
Interview with Mary Patten [Interview]
Mary Patten and Blair Allen Mishleau | The Chicago Anti-Apartheid Movement Collection at Columbia College Chicago | Spring 2009
AIDS, Race, and the Rise and Decline of a Militant Oppositional Lesbian and Gay Politics in the US [Article]*
Jeffrey Edwards | New Political Science Vol. 22 (40 | December 2000
*This is a library resource that requires ARTIC login
Moving politics : emotion and ACT UP's fight against AIDS
Deborah Gould | University of Chicago Press | 2009
Passionate Camera by 
Art AIDS America Chicago by 
Organize Your Own by 
Art Against the Law by 
Support Networks by 
Revolution As an Eternal Dream by 
Signs of Change by Chicago Gay History: Mary Patten
Mary Patten in Video Data Bank's collection
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Conversations at the Edge Lecture Recordings
Conversation at the Edge video recordings (2016–present.) Available with SAIC login credentials.