Mary Patten

Mary Patten is a visual artist, video-maker, writer, educator, and political activist, with lifelong commitments to social movements for racial justice, against the carceral state, to fight the AIDS crisis, and for queer and LGBT liberation. Patten has led or participated in many public collaborations including Chicago Torture Justice Memorials, ACT UP Chicago, the Madame Binh Graphics Collective, and Feel Tank Chicago—to reclaim a “utopia of the everyday,” a way of being together in the world that allows for anger, joy, and reparative visions. Patten has exhibited video installations and moving-image works in alternative spaces, museums, and international film/video festivals, including the Brooklyn Museum, Contemporary Art Museum/Houston, Cooper Union, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, threewalls, Interference Archive, Shedhalle / Zürich, Chicago Cultural Center, Randolph St. Gallery, Creative Time (with Feel Tank Chicago), the New Museum, Kunstverein and Kunsthaus (Hamburg), Rotterdam International Film Festival, London and Hong Kong Lesbian and Gay Film Festivals, MIX/NYC, and the Gene Siskel Film Center. Patten’s book, Revolution as an Eternal Dream: the Exemplary Failure of the Madame Binh Graphics Collective, was published by Half Letter Press in 2011, and essays on AIDS activism and art-making have been published in Art AIDS America Chicago and The Passionate Camera. Patten has been awarded fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council, Artadia, 3Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Since 1993, Patten has been teaching in the Film, Video, New Media, and Animation Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.