Bio
Mary Walling Blackburn was born south of Los Angeles in a town called Orange and now lives in New York City. She is finishing the rough cut for her radio play on the Patriot Act, which will be broadcast by radio transmitter and is working on another radio broadcast destined for an underground library.
Her writing has been published in Afterall, Aperture, Brooklyn Rail, Cabinet Magazine, CTHEORY, lastperformance.org, loudpaper (architectural discourse) and Women and Performance.
In New York, she currently has work at Printed Matter and has exhibited at Smack Mellon Gallery, TGN, the Winter Palace and HEREarts and was awarded a Bessie for performance installation and new media 2001/2002. In Chicago, she has shown work at Links Hall, Chicago Cultural Center, Roots and Culture, and Gallery 400. Southern Exposure (San Francisco) recently installed “This Dream; This Frequency”; pirate radios stud a neighborhood, broadcasting the nocturnal dreams of US soldiers stationed in Iraq and mixed with Mesopotamian dreams found on ancient clay tablets.
This summer she taught “The Taxonomy of Resurrection” at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she has also taught “Dropping Out: The Aesthetics of Disappearance”, and “Visualizing Aggression: Documenting America at War.” She was previously faculty at NYU, and has taught at SUNY-Purchase, Ox-Bow, and Southern Utah University Archeological Field School.
MWB and a pile of her etchings in borrowed ‘digs’ in Manhattan.
