Marlene McCarty is a multidisciplinary artist and activist based in New York. She was a member of the AIDS collective Gran Fury 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.
Early life and education
McCarty was born in 1957 and raised in Lexington, Kentucky. After graduating from Sayre School, McCarty attended the University of Cincinnati College of Design Architecture, Art, and Planning (1975- 1977) before studying in Basel, Switzerland, at Schule fur Gestaltung Basel (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.
Career
Gran Fury
After graduating from Basel in 1983, McCarty moved to New York City's East Village to become an artist. In 1987, while working at M&Co as a designer, McCarty became a member of the AIDS activist art collective Gran Fury. Gran Fury fought to affect AIDS policies, staging public AIDS activist interventions. Their goal was to spread information about AIDS 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 FDA 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 Benetton 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.
In January 2012, the first historical survey of Gran Fury’s world-renowned work opened at the NYU Steinhardt 80WSE gallery. The collective’s work is archived at the Whitney Museum of American Art and New York Public Library.
Bureau, 1989-2001
In 1989, McCarty co-founded Bureau with artist Donald Moffett. Bureau was a “trans-disciplinary design studio” whose mandate was to produce art, film titles, political work, and commercial work. Bureau worked with clients such as Calvin Klein, Sundance, Channel, HBO, and Amazon. In 2014, Bureau received the Visual AIDS Vanguard Award.
Metro Pictures Gallery, 1990s
McCarty landed her first exhibit, Shut Up You Shut Up, 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.
In 1991 McCarty joined Metro Pictures Gallery. Her works were exhibited across the US and Europe accompanied by a catalogue, Die Neoantigen (The Nineties) in 1994 at the Vienna Secession in Austria
Poltergeist, Girls at Home/ The “murder girls” series, 1995–2014
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 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.