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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 he preferred tool for “primate fieldwork.” 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.
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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.
307:, 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." McCarty used found language, appropriating the sexist speech she heard from street harassers and catcallers or that she saw in graffiti. The text was hand drawn and ironed onto T-shirt material that was used as the canvas.
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414:(Tanjung Putting, Borneo. 1971) (2007) shows a Ph.D. candidate with the orangutan who nearly broke up her marriage. McCarty's work enters a topsy-turvy realm where love challenges all the boundaries between us, including how we define ourselves. McCarty says, “I'm trying to go places where we don't comfortably always go.” For these mural cycles, McCarty received the
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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.
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workshops at Hyper Werk
Institute for Postindustrial Design in Basel, Switzerland, and the ETH in Zurich. Her project was awarded additional grants from The American Center Foundation and the Site mapping / Bundesamt fĂĽr Kultur Schweiz grant for technology. Finances required to accomplish her project proved prohibitive.
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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
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In 2003, McCarty received a
Guggenheim Fellowship 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
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In McCarty's portraits, the girls wear see-through clothes revealing nipples, breasts, and vulvas. 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
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McCarty started research for what was to become her most famous body of work, the “murder girls” series or “Poltergeist, Girls at Home,” 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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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. The “murder girl” series was then exhibited in venues such as the Kunst Halle St. Gallen in
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signing and using language. 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
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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
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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
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mothers, parental figures, or, in some instances, girls who had been murdered by their mothers. 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.
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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.
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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.
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are a few of the plants that are both subject and material in Into The Weeds. At once poisonous and healing, McCarty used plants that have historically been used by women to maintain their sexual and reproductive health.
466:, 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.
425:’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.” The catalogue included essays by
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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.
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Kilimnik, Karen (1994). "Die Neunziger = The Nineties : Karen Kilimnik, Jutta Koether, Marlene McCarty : Wiener Secession, 22. März-3. April 1994". Ostfildern:Cantz.
223:(1978 - 1983), 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.
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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
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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
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After graduating from Basel in 1983, McCarty moved to New York City's East Village to become an artist. In 1987, while working at
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McCarty's most recent works turn to plants to affirm ways not only to survive but also to thrive in toxic conditions.
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In the early 2000s, McCarty was represented by the American Fine Arts Gallery in Soho, run by Colin de Lande, and the
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properties and medicinal uses, as well as including the local history of the plants and geographical area.
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College of Design Architecture, Art, and Planning (1975- 1977) before studying in Basel, Switzerland, at
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is a multidisciplinary artist and activist based in New York. She was a member of the AIDS collective
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with, I think they are not foreign to the vast majority of us, but we don't cross that boundary.”
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love lined the gallery. This work culminated in a monumental 2013 drawing retrospective at the
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In January 2012, the first historical survey of Gran Fury’s world-renowned work opened at the
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926:"Real Life Teenage Girls Marlene McCarty's Monumental Ballpoint Pen Drawings Go Interactive"
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at Last Tango were produced during the COVID-19 pandemic at the time of the first major
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in Germany. Cycles of mural size drawings from this body of work were exhibited at the
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1080:"NYU's 80WSE Gallery Presents Major Survey of Artist Marlene McCarty, Thru Dec. 18"
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527:. The permanent garden Into The Weeds is open to the public in Buffalo, New York.
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603:"The Government Has Blood on Its Hands [One AIDS Death Every Half Hour]"
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Can I Borrow Your Hole at Last Tango, Zurich, Switzerland, 11 Sep – 19 Dec 2020
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of Dublin, Ireland, titled Hard Keepers. These mural-sized drawings included
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Steinhardt 80WSE gallery. The collective’s work is archived at the
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716:"Rules of Attraction: The uncomfortable world of Marlene McCarty"
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Poltergeist, Girls at Home/ The “murder girls” series, 1995–2014
818:"A Discussion of power: a conversation with Marlene McCarty"
318:(The Nineties) in 1994 at the Vienna Secession in Austria
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interventions. Their goal was to spread information about
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McCarty's work may be found in the collections of the
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291:In 1989, McCarty co-founded Bureau with artist
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240:as a designer, McCarty became a member of the
847:"Making Cutting-Edge Art with Ballpoint Pens"
924:Ensslin, Felix; de Beer, Sue (25 May 2018).
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53:Learn how and when to remove these messages
901:John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
183:Learn how and when to remove this message
165:Learn how and when to remove this message
110:Learn how and when to remove this message
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1112:"Marlene McCarty: Into The Weeds"
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955:"Art In Review; Marlene McCarty"
147:guide to writing better articles
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845:Morse, Trent (8 January 2014).
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984:bienal iKSV
657:Visual Aids
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435:Bikini Kill
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155:August 2021
100:August 2021
1162:Categories
559:2021-01-26
531:References
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407:orangutans
39:improve it
250:Gran Fury
246:Gran Fury
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