Mary Ellen Carroll: How To Talk Dirty and Influence People

In Carroll's civic-oriented conceptual art, humor and provocation sit alongside rigorous research and ethical commitment

Published with Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.

Working across performance, publishing, urban intervention and long-term social engagement, New York-based artist Mary Ellen Carroll (born 1961) uses conversation, contracts, zoning codes and bureaucratic processes as the key components of their conceptual language. Their practice unfolds through law, architecture and lived systems rather than discrete objects. The artist often operates in real time and in public view, embracing uncertainty, risk and contradiction as generative conditions. How To Talk Dirty and Influence People offers a comprehensive overview of Carroll's work since the 1980s. Bringing together performance documentation, new critical essays, commissioned fiction and poetry and conversations with the artist, this publication presents the oeuvre of an artist whose work insists that speech, negotiation and persistence are powerful tools for reshaping social reality.