Marlene McCarty

Last updated

Marlene McCarty is a multidisciplinary artist and activist based in New York. She was a member of the AIDS collective Gran Fury and co-founded the trans-disciplinary design studio Bureau. Using everyday materials including graphite, ballpoint pen, and highlighter, McCarty creates mural-sized drawings related to issues ranging from sexual and social formation, gender and power, to parricide and infanticide. [1]

Contents

Early life and education

McCarty was born in 1957 and raised in Lexington, Kentucky. After graduating from Sayre School, McCarty attended the University of Cincinnati College of Design Architecture, Art, and Planning (1975- 1977) before studying in Basel, Switzerland, at Schule fur Gestaltung Basel (1978 - 1983), [1] where she `majored in design. During the early 1980s in Basel, McCarty did scenic installations for Punk and New Wave bands at Kulturhaus Palazzo in Leistal. [2]

Career

Gran Fury

After graduating from Basel in 1983, McCarty moved to New York City's East Village to become an artist. In 1987, while working at M&Co as a designer, McCarty became a member of the AIDS activist art collective Gran Fury.[ citation needed ] Gran Fury fought to affect AIDS policies, staging public AIDS activist interventions. Their goal was to spread information about AIDS at a time when the government was not speaking on this issue. Their major projects include The Government Has Blood on Its Hands, an action at FDA headquarters in Washington, D.C., that protested Federal policies concerning AIDS drugs, drug trials, and access to drugs. Kissing Doesn’t Kill was an appropriation of a Benetton ad showing a diverse group of same sex, interracial, and heterosexual couples kissing, placed on city buses across America countering the public fear that kissing transmitted AIDS. [3]

In January 2012, the first historical survey of Gran Fury’s world-renowned work opened at the NYU Steinhardt 80WSE gallery. The collective’s work is archived at the Whitney Museum of American Art and New York Public Library.[ citation needed ]

Bureau, 1989-2001

In 1989, McCarty co-founded Bureau with artist Donald Moffett. Bureau was a “trans-disciplinary design studio” [1] whose mandate was to produce art, film titles, political work, and commercial work. Bureau worked with clients such as Calvin Klein, Sundance, Channel, HBO, and Amazon. [4] In 2014, Bureau received the Visual AIDS Vanguard Award. [5]

Metro Pictures Gallery, 1990s

McCarty landed her first exhibit, Shut Up You Shut Up, at Wessel O-Conner Gallery in 1990. Her early works were large text paintings featuring words such as "Slash" and "Snatch" in a highly stylized typeface, or single phrases such as "I may not go down in history but I may go down on your little sister," and "You're my slut bottom suck." [6] McCarty used found language, appropriating the sexist speech she heard from street harassers and catcallers or that she saw in graffiti. [2] [6] The text was hand drawn and ironed onto T-shirt material that was used as the canvas. [7]

In 1991 McCarty joined Metro Pictures Gallery. [8] Her works were exhibited across the US and Europe accompanied by a catalogue, Die Neoantigen (The Nineties) in 1994 at the Vienna Secession in Austria [9]

Poltergeist, Girls at Home/ The “murder girls” series, 1995–2014

McCarty started research for what was to become her most famous body of work, the “murder girls” series or “Poltergeist, Girls at Home,” [10] a series of 42 mural-sized portraits made with graphite pencil and ball-point pen. Each portrait was based on a true crime case of teenage girls who murdered their mothers, parental figures, or, in some instances, girls who had been murdered by their mothers. [11] McCarty found the final effect of iron-on portraits using the girls' photographs to look like “Warhol wannabes” that were more about production and manufacturing than about the girls themselves.

In McCarty's portraits, the girls wear see-through clothes revealing nipples, breasts, and vulvas. [7] The artist wanted to draw attention to the changing social expectations of the girls as they transitioned from girlhood to womanhood. She took great care to distinguish the work from sensationalist true crime tales by including a written addendum with each portrait, combining touching details of the girls' lives with descriptions of the murders they committed. The addenda gave context to the drawings because, as she says, “If you didn't know anything, you see a teenage girl with see-through clothes.” McCarty planned on documenting all cases she found within her lifetime, but due to the birth of social media and subsequent loss of privacy controls, McCarty no longer makes these works. She now views her drawings as intimate and contextual and has no interest in her work being disseminated to millions via social media.[ citation needed ]

Due to the artist's challenging subject matter, it took a long time for her portraits to be absorbed by the art world. In an unpublished interview for The Believer, McCarty related the girls’ experiences with those of the general public by saying, “I think the struggles that these girls are fighting with, I think they are not foreign to the vast majority of us, but we don't cross that boundary.” [ citation needed ]

From painting to drawing

The “murder girls” series marked an important moment in McCarty's artistic practice as it solidified her commitment to drawing and shift from text paintings. This change was one that McCarty herself didn't foresee. For example, she said, “If you'd told me a year before I started the murder girls that I would have been doing figurative drawings, I would have told you that you were out of your mind.” Nonetheless, after completing the “murder girls” series, she was unable to stop drawing. It was drawing's association with the low-brow and its position beyond “mastership” and “master” that attracted McCarty. For example, McCarty draws with a blue ballpoint pen, which is what high-school girls use for their homework or for “doodling on their notebooks,” and it is also the preferred tool for “primate fieldwork.” [12] Although McCarty finds the medium physically demanding (because the pressure required to keep the ink flowing when drawing on a wall may cause shoulder injuries), she continues to work with ballpoint pen and graphite, producing monumental works that speak to social and sexual inequality, the role of women, interspecies relationships, and trans biology. [12] [13]

Guggenheim Fellowship

In 2003, McCarty received a Guggenheim Fellowship [14] to research a 3D immersive project, Bad Blood, which was an interactive sculpture based on the portrait of Marlene Olive from the artist's “murder girls” series. As part of her Fellowship, McCarty traveled the world speaking with experts and leading workshops at Hyper Werk Institute for Postindustrial Design in Basel, Switzerland, and the ETH in Zurich. [15] Her project was awarded additional grants from The American Center Foundation and the Site mapping / Bundesamt für Kultur Schweiz grant for technology. Finances required to accomplish her project proved prohibitive. [15]

In the early 2000s, McCarty was represented by the American Fine Arts Gallery in Soho, run by Colin de Lande, and the Bronwyn Keenan Gallery. Both galleries presented her series of poltergeist girls at home in 2002. [16] The exhibit at Bronwyn Keenan Gallery, Young Americans, Part 2, featured McCarty's newer multi-figure drawings. One drawing was inspired by an Indiana crime case where four girls murdered a schoolmate because she was having an affair with another girl's female lover. [16] The “murder girl” series was then exhibited in venues such as the Kunst Halle St. Gallen in Switzerland and the Museum Ludwig in Germany. Cycles of mural size drawings from this body of work were exhibited at the Istanbul Biennial and the Busan Biennale and reside in collections at the Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles [17] [18] [19]

In 2005, the Brent Sikkema Gallery, which is now known as Sikkema, Jenkins & Co., began representing McCarty's work. In 2008, McCarty presented a major body of work under the exhibition title CANDY.CRY.STINKER.HUG. Mural size drawings that reckoned with queerness, origin, genetics, identity, and love lined the gallery. This work culminated in a monumental 2013 drawing retrospective at the Royal Hibernian Academy of Dublin, Ireland, titled Hard Keepers. These mural-sized drawings included gorillas, orangutans, and chimpanzees signing and using language. [7] Others portray women loving and living with chimps and gorillas. Group 8 (Karisoke, The Virunga's, Rwanda. September 24, 1967. 4:30pm.) (2006) pictures a young woman, perhaps a primatologist, twined, enmeshed, and eroticized with her favorite gorilla, while group 3 (Tanjung Putting, Borneo. 1971) (2007) shows a Ph.D. candidate with the orangutan who nearly broke up her marriage. [7] McCarty's work enters a topsy-turvy realm where love challenges all the boundaries between us, including how we define ourselves. [7] McCarty says, “I'm trying to go places where we don't comfortably always go.” For these mural cycles, McCarty received the Pollock-Krasner grant. [20]

In 2010 New York University’s 80WSE gallery presented the first major survey of Marlene McCarty's paintings, prints, and drawings, “i'm into you now: some work from 1980-2010.” [21] The catalogue included essays by Kathleen Hanna, former lead singer of Le Tigre and Bikini Kill, who wrote, “Marlene's studio was wallpapered with the craziest fucking drawings I’ve ever seen. It looked like a coked up teenage girl decided to take the big pen drawings off her trapper keeper and magnifying them a thousand times. they read like sexed up... paintings advertising a new cult I desperately wanted to join. They were big as billboards obsessive and completely unapologetic.[ citation needed ]

Into The Weeds

McCarty's most recent works turn to plants to affirm ways not only to survive but also to thrive in toxic conditions.[ citation needed ]

Into The Weeds was first presented at UB Art Gallery, Center for the Arts, Buffalo, New York, where a large-scale drawing installation was accompanied by an installation of seedlings under grow lights and a large mound of soil that was home to a variety of potent plants. [22] Mugwort, Queen Anne's lace, and jimson weed are a few of the plants that are both subject and material in Into The Weeds. [22] At once poisonous and healing, McCarty used plants that have historically been used by women to maintain their sexual and reproductive health. Mugwort, for instance, promotes menstruation and can be used to induce abortion and regulate hormonal changes during menopause. The majority of the plants are wild and considered to be weeds.[ citation needed ]

Her drawings ruminate on masculinity, capitalism, whiteness, and their inherent toxicities, layering and merging unruly poisonous flowers with flesh and hair, using graphite and ballpoint pen. Alongside the installation, McCarty includes newsprint pamphlets identifying the plants’ poisonous properties and medicinal uses, as well as including the local history of the plants and geographical area.

To extend the project outside of the gallery walls, McCarty created a 45-foot diameter public garden of poisonous plants, with the support of UB Arts Collaboratory and Silo City. The garden, which is McCarty's first living earthwork, is under Silo City's long-term stewardship and the care of ecologist Josh Smith. [22]

Kunsthaus Baselland, Switzerland, 2020 similarly had an installation of the artist's large-scale drawings alongside an indoor garden of powerful plants with a germination table where plants grew during the extended length of the exhibition. The third installation of this work is currently on display at Last Tango in Zurich, Switzerland.[ citation needed ]

Can I Borrow Your Hole at Last Tango, Zurich, Switzerland, 11 Sep – 19 Dec 2020

The works in Can I Borrow Your Hole at Last Tango were produced during the COVID-19 pandemic at the time of the first major Black Lives Matter protests. The works contain some of the artist's first small drawings and are installed on placards designed to highlight the power of taking to the streets to demand institutional change. The placards make the drawings both interventionist and immersive. The titles reintroduce McCarty's earlier work with text. Using homonyms, McCarty plays with the meaning of language by imbuing the work with a complex layering, playing with the contradictions found in society and touching upon the political chaos and divisiveness of present-day America, as well as the care and collective activism witnessed in the response to the tumultuous times.[ citation needed ]

Permanent collections

McCarty's work may be found in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, [23] the Rubell Museum, the Queens Museum, Contemporary Art Museum, Houston, the Smith College Museum of Art, the Berkeley Art Museum, and the Nasher Museum of Art.[ citation needed ] The permanent garden Into The Weeds is open to the public in Buffalo, New York. [22]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ballpoint pen</span> Device dispensing ink over a metal ball at its point

A ballpoint pen, also known as a biro, ball pen, or dot pen, is a pen that dispenses ink over a metal ball at its point, i.e., over a "ball point". The metals commonly used are steel, brass, or tungsten carbide. The design was conceived and developed as a cleaner and more reliable alternative to dip pens and fountain pens, and it is now the world's most-used writing instrument; millions are manufactured and sold daily. It has influenced art and graphic design and spawned an artwork genre.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Keith Haring</span> American artist and social activist (1958–1990)

Keith Allen Haring was an American artist whose pop art emerged from the New York City graffiti subculture of the 1980s. His animated imagery has "become a widely recognized visual language". Much of his work includes sexual allusions that turned into social activism by using the images to advocate for safe sex and AIDS awareness. In addition to solo gallery exhibitions, he participated in renowned national and international group shows such as documenta in Kassel, the Whitney Biennial in New York, the São Paulo Biennial, and the Venice Biennale. The Whitney Museum held a retrospective of his art in 1997.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wendy Sharpe</span> Australian artist (born 1960)

Wendy Sharpe is an Australian artist who lives and works in Sydney and Paris. She has held over 70 solo exhibitions nationally and internationally, been awarded many national awards and artist residencies for her work, and was an official Australian War Artist to East Timor in 1999–2000.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rita Angus</span> New Zealand artist (1908–1970)

Rita Angus, known as Rita Cook early in her career, was a New Zealand painter who, alongside Colin McCahon and Toss Woollaston, is regarded as one of the leading figures in twentieth-century New Zealand art. She worked primarily in oil and watercolour, and became known for her portraits and landscapes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gran Fury</span> U.S. AIDS activist artist collective

Emerging from ACT UP in 1988, Gran Fury was an AIDS activist artist collective from New York City consisting of 11 members including: Richard Elovich, Avram Finkelstein, Amy Heard, Tom Kalin, John Lindell, Loring McAlpin, Marlene McCarty, Donald Moffett, Michael Nesline, Mark Simpson and Robert Vazquez-Pacheco.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elizabeth Peyton</span> American painter

Elizabeth Joy Peyton is an American contemporary artist working primarily in painting, drawing, and printmaking. Best known for figures from her own life and those beyond it, including close friends, historical personae, and icons of contemporary culture, Peyton's portraits have regularly featured artists, writers, musicians, and actors.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Violet Oakley</span> American artist

Violet Oakley was an American artist. She was the first American woman to receive a public mural commission. During the first quarter of the 20th century, she was renowned as a pathbreaker in mural decoration, a field that had been exclusively practiced by men. Oakley excelled at murals and stained glass designs that addressed themes from history and literature in Renaissance-revival styles.

Evelyn Mary Dunbar was a British artist, illustrator and teacher. She is notable for recording women's contributions to World War II on the United Kingdom home front, particularly the work of the Women's Land Army. She was the only woman working for the War Artists' Advisory Committee on a full-time salaried basis. Dunbar had a deep devotion to nature and a particular affection for the landscape of Kent. Dunbar was modest regarding her achievements and outside of the post-war mainstream art world which has led to some neglect of her work until recent years. She painted murals at Brockley County Secondary School, and was a member of the Society of Mural Painters. After the war she painted portraits, allegorical pictures and especially landscapes. She attempted a return to mural painting in 1958 with a commission at Bletchley Park Teacher Training College, but was unable to fulfil the original specification.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marion Greenwood</span> American artist

Marion Kathryn Greenwood was an American social realist artist who became popular starting in the 1920s and became renowned in both the United States and Mexico. She is most well known for her murals, but she also practiced easel painting, printmaking, and frescoes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ballpoint pen artwork</span> Artwork drawn using ballpoint pen

Since their invention and subsequent proliferation in the mid-20th century, ballpoint pens have proven to be a versatile art medium for professional artists as well as amateur doodlers. Ballpoint pen artwork created over the years have been favorably compared to art created using traditional art mediums. Low cost, availability, and portability are cited by practitioners as qualities which make this common writing tool a convenient, alternative art supply.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Toyin Ojih Odutola</span> Nigerian visual artist

Toyin Ojih Odutola is a Nigerian-American contemporary visual artist known for her vivid multimedia drawings and works on paper. Her unique style of complex mark-making and lavish compositions rethink the category and traditions of portraiture and storytelling. Ojih Odutola's artwork often investigates a variety of themes from socio-economic inequality, the legacy of colonialism, queer and gender theory, notions of blackness as a visual and social symbol, as well as experiences of migration and dislocation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lennie Mace</span> American contemporary artist (born 1965)

Lennie Mace is an American contemporary artist, born in New York City. Mace is predominantly known for his drawings in ballpoint pen, using them to create fine artwork. He is considered a pioneer of the medium. His imagination has also served commercial purposes, appearing in print as illustrations and comic art. Art reviewers have referred to Mace as the da Vinci of doodlers and the ballpoint Picasso.

James Mylne is a British contemporary artist known for his drawings in ballpoint pen. His technical abilities with the unorthodox art medium have earned Mylne recognition in Europe and the UK. The Ballpointer online journal called Mylne "Britain's premier ballpoint pen artist" in a 2015 feature article. The artist's photorealist likenesses of iconic celebrities attracted early media attention and continues to be one aspect of his output. Mylne also creates mixed-media works adding spray paint, magic markers and more to his ballpoint originals. Artwork expressing personal views and broader interests flourished throughout 2014.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Shantell Martin</span> British visual artist (born 1980)

Shantell Martin is a British visual artist, intuitive philosopher, cultural facilitator, teacher, choreographer, songwriter, performer, and more. Best known for her large scale, black-and-white line drawings, she performs many of her drawings for a live audience. Born in Thamesmead, London, Martin lives and works in Los Angeles and New York. Along with exhibitions and commission for museums and galleries, Martin frequently collaborates with international commercial projects, both private and public.

Shizu Saldamando, is an American visual artist. Her work merges painting and collage in portraits that often deal with social constructs of identity and subcultures. Saldamando also works in video, installation and performance art. She has been featured in numerous exhibitions, has attained accolades like that of Wanlass Artist in Residence, and is a successful writer, tattoo artist, and social activist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alice Kent Stoddard</span> American painter

Alice Kent Stoddard (1883–1976) was an American painter of portraits, landscapes, and seascapes. Many of her works, particularly portraits, are in public collections, including University of Pennsylvania's portrait collection, Woodmere Art Museum, and other museums. She lived and painted on Monhegan Island in Maine, an enclave of artists. During World War II, she worked as a combat artist and drafted designs for airplanes. She married late in life to Joseph Pearson, who had been a friend and taught at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Kim McCarty is an artist and watercolor painter living and working in Los Angeles, California. Her work has been exhibited in over twenty solo exhibitions in New York and Los Angeles. She often works in large formats using layers of monochromatic colors.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Barbecue murders</span> 1975 double homicide in Marin County, California, United States

The barbecue murders, also known as the BBQ murders, refers to a 1975 double murder in Marin County, California, United States. Business consultant James "Jim" Olive and his wife Naomi were murdered in their home by their 16-year-old adopted daughter Marlene and her 20-year-old boyfriend Charles "Chuck" Riley, who then attempted to dispose of the bodies by burning them in a barbecue pit at a nearby campground. Riley was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder and received a sentence of death, which was later changed to life imprisonment with the possibility of parole. Marlene, tried as a juvenile, received a sentence of three to six years in a California Youth Authority juvenile facility, from which she was released at age 21 having served a little over four years.

Jennifer Packer is a contemporary American painter and educator based in New York City. Packer's subject matter includes political portraits, interior scenes, and still life featuring contemporary Black American experiences. She paints portraits of contemporaries, funerary flower arrangements, and other subjects through close observation. Primarily working in oil paint, her style uses loose, improvisational brush strokes, and a limited color palette.

Oscar Ukonu is a Nigerian ballpoint pen artist based in Lagos, Nigeria. He is known for his hyperrealist portraits.

References

  1. 1 2 3 "MARLENEMcCARTY". Sikkema Jenkins & Co. Retrieved 2021-01-26.
  2. 1 2 Kellner, Amy (November 2010). "The 90's Were Intense". Vice. Retrieved 26 March 2021.
  3. ↑ "The Government Has Blood on Its Hands [One AIDS Death Every Half Hour]". NewYorkPublicLibrary. Retrieved 26 March 2021.
  4. ↑ "Marlene McCarty". Art of the Title. Retrieved 26 March 2021.
  5. ↑ "VAVA honoring Bureau (Marlene McCarty & Donald Moffett), Dr. Brian Saltzman and Kia Michelle Benbow". Visual Aids. Retrieved 26 March 2021.
  6. 1 2 "Marlene McCarty". Metro Pictures. Retrieved 26 March 2021.
  7. 1 2 3 4 5 Kabat, Jennifer (21 November 2013). "Rules of Attraction: The uncomfortable world of Marlene McCarty". Frieze (159).
  8. ↑ "Marlene McCarty". Metro Pictures. Retrieved 26 March 2021.
  9. ↑ Kilimnik, Karen (1994). "Die Neunziger = The Nineties : Karen Kilimnik, Jutta Koether, Marlene McCarty : Wiener Secession, 22. März-3. April 1994". Ostfildern:Cantz.{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  10. ↑ Jasper, Adam. "Marlene McCarty Kunsthaus Baselland". ArtForum. Retrieved 26 March 2021.
  11. ↑ Relyea, Laura (15 September 2017). "A Discussion of power: a conversation with Marlene McCarty". Artsatl. Retrieved 26 March 2021.
  12. 1 2 Morse, Trent (8 January 2014). "Making Cutting-Edge Art with Ballpoint Pens". ARTNews. Retrieved 26 March 2021.
  13. ↑ "Marlene McCarty". Artsy. Retrieved 26 March 2021.
  14. ↑ "Marlene McCarty". John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Retrieved 26 March 2021.
  15. 1 2 Ensslin, Felix; de Beer, Sue (25 May 2018). "Real Life Teenage Girls Marlene McCarty's Monumental Ballpoint Pen Drawings Go Interactive". Plazm Magazine. Retrieved 26 March 2021.
  16. 1 2 Holland, Cotter (22 February 2002). "Art In Review; Marlene McCarty". The New York Times. Retrieved 26 March 2021.
  17. ↑ "8th International Istanbul Biennial Poetic Justice". bienal iKSV. Retrieved 26 March 2021.
  18. ↑ "Marlene McCarty". MoMA. Retrieved 26 March 2021.
  19. ↑ "Marlene McCarty". moca. Retrieved 26 March 2021.
  20. ↑ "Marlene McCarty". The Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Retrieved 26 March 2021.
  21. ↑ "NYU's 80WSE Gallery Presents Major Survey of Artist Marlene McCarty, Thru Dec. 18". NYU. Retrieved 26 March 2021.
  22. 1 2 3 4 "Marlene McCarty: Into The Weeds". UB Art Galleries. Retrieved 26 March 2021.
  23. ↑ "Pussy,Beaver,Cunt". Brooklyn Museum. Retrieved 26 March 2021.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.