Apply to the School of Art

Marlene McCarty

Adjunct Professor

Marlene McCarty is a visual artist working primarily in New York City and Europe. In November 2010, 80WSE in New York hosted a retrospective of her work from the last 30 years. McCarty’s earliest work includes painting installations created for European Punk and New Wave bands while she was studying design at the Allegemeine Kunstgewerbeschule Basel, 1978 - 1983. Moving to New York City’s East Village in 1983, McCarty worked with Tibor Kalman at the famed M&Co while making artwork at home, afterhours. In the late 1980’s McCarty was a member of Gran Fury, the AIDS activist collective and simultaneously created a body of abrasive text paintings, which were exhibited widely in the United States and Europe. In 1989, with Donald Moffett she founded Bureau, a “trans-disciplinary design studio” whose mandate was to produce art, film titles, political work, and brand identities. In 1990 Gran Fury’s installation at the Venice Biennali Aperto caused quite a scandal. Today, McCarty continues designing film titles for such films as Meek’s Cutoff, Mildred Pierce, I’m Not There, Far from Heaven, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and American Psycho among many others.

2012, Gran Fury will have a retrospective at 80WSE in NYC and McCarty will have a drawing retrospective at The Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin. In 2008, McCarty was a participant in the Busan Biennale (Korea), “Expenditure“ and the North Miami MOCA exhibition, Dark Continents. In 2006 – 2007, her work was seen at Museum Ludwig’s exhibition The Eighth Square (Cologne, Germany), in the Schirn Kunsthalle’s exhibition, Die Jugend von Heute (Frankfurt, Germany), in the Between 2 Deaths exhibition at ZKM (Karlsruhe, Germany) as well as in Silicone Valley at P.S.1 (New York). McCarty was an American representative to the Istanbul Biennial for 2003. She is represented by the Sikkema Jenkins and Co. gallery. Her work is in numerous collections including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA, NY) and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA, LA).

She received a Guggenheim Fellowship (2002-2003), a Pollack-Krasner Grant (2007), the Richard Diebenkorn Foundation Fellowship (2009 and the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture Teaching Fellowship (2011).

Presently she is adjunct professor at Cooper Union for Advanced Drawing and Two Dimensional Design. She has also taught at Yale, and New York University with visiting artist workshops at Cal Arts, Cranbrook, Otis, Princeton, Harvard, and Rhode Island School of Design among other institutions.

Projects & Links

0 0

  • Founded by inventor, industrialist and philanthropist Peter Cooper in 1859, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art offers education in art, architecture and engineering, as well as courses in the humanities and social sciences.

  • “My feelings, my desires, my hopes, embrace humanity throughout the world,” Peter Cooper proclaimed in a speech in 1853. He looked forward to a time when, “knowledge shall cover the earth as waters cover the great deep.”

  • From its beginnings, Cooper Union was a unique institution, dedicated to founder Peter Cooper's proposition that education is the key not only to personal prosperity but to civic virtue and harmony.

  • Peter Cooper wanted his graduates to acquire the technical mastery and entrepreneurial skills, enrich their intellects and spark their creativity, and develop a sense of social justice that would translate into action.