Talk Dirty Hat

Mary Ellen Carroll: How To Talk Dirty and Influence People is the first exhibition to survey the work of acclaimed multidisciplinary artist Mary Ellen Carroll. The exhibition focuses on a selection of key projects spanning over four decades and includes works exhibited for the first time. The exhibition charts the import and impact of Carroll’s exploration of some of the most urgent issues of our time, including environmentalism, architectural and technological infrastructure, immigration, and urban legislation, as well as the artist’s engagement with questions of sexuality, identity, and being.

Mary Ellen Carroll: How To Talk Dirty and Influence People highlights the multifaceted, aesthetically rigorous work of an artist who has demonstrated deft institutional critiques of art and used their artwork to interact with and question the politics and policies surrounding social and physical structures, including the ways in which bodies navigate these spaces. Employing a conceptually-driven form of exhibition making, the exhibition both honors and mirrors Carroll’s recursive, materially diverse, and ecologically-attuned practice through a display in which works are always seen through, between, and in relation to each other. Mary Ellen Carroll: How To Talk Dirty and Influence People offers the occasion to reconsider Carroll’s work and the questions it raises about identity and intimacy, objects/ideas and their afterlives, and the value that political and social activism informed by humor and play might offer contemporary critical practices.