Mary Ellen Carroll

Mary Ellen Carroll (MEC, studios) is a conceptual artist whose work inhabits the disciplines of architecture/design, film, writing, performance, and technology. Her work centers on the question: what do we consider a work of art?

Carroll received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (IL). She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Guna S. Mundheim Fellow in the Visual Arts at the American Academy in Berlin, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and two Pollock-Krasner Foundation Awards. Her work has been exhibited in numerous public and private collections including The Whitney Museum (NY), ICA (Philadelphia/London), and the Renaissance Society, Chicago (IL).

Since 1999, Mary Ellen Carroll has been working on prototype 180, an aggregate work located in Houston, Texas. The project is a combination of public art, architecture, and event. In the fall of 2007, the year of Carroll’s Arts/Industry residency, a house in a subdivision outside of Houston was lifted, turned 180 degrees, and placed in its original footprint, The house had video cameras mounted to each corner that live streamed the event at P.S. 1 MOMA, in New York City. Since its inaugural rotation, prototype 180 has been exhibited at Columbia University’s GSAPP, Galerie Stadtpark, Krems (Austria) and the Generali Foundation (Austria).

During her residency in the Kohler Co. Pottery, Carroll worked on slip-cast vitreous components that were used on the façade of the house.