City in a Garden Roundtable | Nick Cave, Edie Fake, and Mary Patten

About the Event

How can an artist be an activist? Encounter three wide-ranging set of approaches by artists in City in Garden: Queer Art and Activism in Chicago, including Nick Cave, Edie Fake, and Mary Patten, in conversation with exhibition curator Jack Schneider.

Access Information

CART captioning in English and Spanish are available for this talk. To request additional accessibility services, please contact us at [email protected] or 312-397-4076.

About the Speakers

Nick Cave (b. 1959, Fulton, MO; lives and works in Chicago, IL) is an artist, educator, and foremost a messenger, working between the visual and performing arts through a wide range of mediums including sculpture, installation, video, sound, and performance. Cave is well known for his Soundsuits, sculptural forms based on the scale of his body, initially created in direct response to the police beating of Rodney King in 1991. Soundsuits camouflage the body, masking and creating a second skin that conceals race, gender, and class, forcing the viewer to look without judgment. They serve as a visual embodiment of social justice that represent both brutality and empowerment.

Throughout his practice, Cave has created spaces of memorial through combining found historical objects with contemporary dialogues on gun violence and death, underscoring the anxiety of severe trauma brought on by catastrophic loss. The figure remains central as Cave casts his own body in bronze, an extension of the performative work so critical to his oeuvre. Cave reminds us, however, that while there may be despair, there remains space for hope and renewal. From dismembered body parts stem delicate metal flowers, affirming the potential of new growth. Cave encourages a profound and compassionate analysis of violence and its effects as the path towards an ultimate metamorphosis. While Cave’s works are rooted in our current societal moment, when progress on issues of global warming, racism, and gun violence (both at the hands of citizens and law enforcement) seem maddeningly stalled, he asks how we may reposition ourselves to recognize the issues, come together on a global scale, instigate change, and ultimately, heal.

Edie Fake is a painter and visual artist whose work examines issues of trans identity and “queer space” through the lens of architecture and ornamentation. Fake’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including solo shows at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, NY, and Marlborough Contemporary, NYC, and in group shows at the Museum of Arts and Design, NYC, and the Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU in Richmond, VA. His collection of comics, Gaylord Phoenix, won the 2011 Ignatz Award for Outstanding Graphic Novel and he was among the first recipients of Printed Matter’s Awards for Artists. Fake’s large-scale projects include murals for The Drawing Center, NYC, and MCA Chicago. He received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2002 and he is currently represented by Western Exhibitions in Chicago and Broadway Gallery in New York.

Mary Patten is a visual artist, video-maker, writer, educator, and political activist, with lifelong commitments to social movements for racial justice, against the carceral state, to fight the AIDS crisis, and for queer and LGBT liberation. Patten has led or participated in many public collaborations including Chicago Torture Justice Memorials, ACT UP Chicago, the Madame Binh Graphics Collective, and Feel Tank Chicago—to reclaim a “utopia of the everyday,” a way of being together in the world that allows for anger, joy, and reparative visions. Patten has exhibited video installations and moving-image works in alternative spaces, museums, and international film / video festivals, including the Brooklyn Museum, Contemporary Art Museum / Houston, Cooper Union, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, threewalls, Interference Archive, Shedhalle / Zürich, Chicago Cultural Center, Randolph St. Gallery, Creative Time (with Feel Tank Chicago), the New Museum, Kunstverein and Kunsthaus (Hamburg), Rotterdam International Film Festival, London and Hong Kong Lesbian and Gay Film Festivals, MIX/NYC, and the Gene Siskel Film Center. Patten’s book, Revolution as an Eternal Dream: the Exemplary Failure of the Madame Binh Graphics Collective, was published by Half Letter Press in 2011, and essays on AIDS activism and art-making have been published in Art AIDS America Chicago and The Passionate Camera. Patten has been awarded fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council, Artadia, 3Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Since 1993, Patten has been teaching in the Film, Video, New Media, and Animation Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

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