Mary Ellen Carroll: How To Talk Dirty and Influence People Catalogue

Mary Ellen Carroll: How To Talk Dirty and Influence People

Edited by Rebecca Matalon, Karen Kelly, and Barbara Schroeder. Introduction and text by Rebecca Matalon, Pamela M. Lee, Iman Mersal, Kathryn Scanlan. Interviews by David Joselit, Hamza Walker.

In Carroll’s civic-oriented conceptual art, humor and provocation sit alongside rigorous research and ethical commitment.

Working across performance, publishing, urban intervention, and long-term social engagement, New York–based artist Mary Ellen Carroll (born 1961) uses conversation, contracts, zoning codes, and bureaucratic processes as the key components of their conceptual language. Their practice unfolds through law, architecture, and lived systems rather than discrete objects. They often operate in real time and in public view, embracing 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 performance documentation, new critical essays, commissioned fiction and poetry, and conversations with the artist, this publication offers a comprehensive overview of an artist whose work insists that speech, negotiation, and persistence are powerful tools for reshaping social reality.

292 pages