In conversation: Mary Ellen Carroll with Ruth Noack

Join artist Mary Ellen Carroll and curator Ruth Noack for a series of presentations about their independent practices and a discussion on how their shared interests have resulted in collaborative exhibitions, proposals, and actions. VAC director Max Fields and assistant curator Melissa Fandos will mediate the guests’ conversation and lead a Q&A with the audience.

The work of New York-based conceptual artist Mary Ellen Carroll (MEC, studios) occupies the disciplines of architecture, art, public policy, film/media, and technology and notably in the ongoing durational works — the opus prototype 180, PUBLIC UTILITY 2.0, and indestructible language on climate and migration. Carroll’s experimentation and oeuvre spans over four decades in a range of media that transcend genres and is dedicated to a social/political critique that explores the interactions of subjectivity, language, and power/knowledge. A recipient of numerous awards and honors including the Guggenheim Foundation, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, American Academy in Berlin, Rockefeller Foundation, and Graham Foundation, and in 2022 a Prix de Rome Fellow among others. Teaching, lecturing and public presentations on the built environment, art, and public policy are an important part of Carroll’s work and institutions have included the DIA Art Foundation, Columbia University, American Academy in Berlin, Rice University, Yale University, among others. Carroll’s work is in numerous public and private collections in the US and abroad and a major museum survey exhibition will open on October 23, 2025 and is being curated by Rebecca Matalon for the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.

Ruth Noack, an art historian, writer, teacher, and exhibition maker, is best known to the global art world as curator of documenta 12. Between 2019 and 2022, she acted as Executive Director and Curator of The Corner at Whitman–Walker in Washington, D.C. Her exhibitions at The Corner included The Mental Body, on aesthetic acts of self-creation and self-care, Stay Alive to Life, on resilience in times of COVID, See You There, on making history at Whitman–Walker and, When We First Arrived..., an exhibition with DYKWTCA.com, which amplified testimonies of children detained at the US-Mexico border through the works of 123 visual artists. Amongst Noack’s other recent exhibitions are the cycle begun in Trieste in 2023 on Eccentric Peripheries, and the cycle Sleeping with a Vengeance, Dreaming of a Life, shown in Athens, Prague, Beijing and at Württembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart (2019/20).

From 1994 onwards, she curated numerous exhibitions together with Roger M.Buergel, amongst them Things We Don’t Understand at Generali Foundation, Vienna and a cycle on Foucault’s concept of governmentality in Vienna, Miami and Rotterdam. Serving as Head of Curating Contemporary Art at The Royal College in London (2012/2013), Noack has taught at universities and academies for more than 20 years, including 4 years at the Dutch Art Institute and guest professorships at AVU, Prague and Städelschule, Frankfurt. She has lectured internationally and authored more than 50 essays on art and on theory. In 2013, Noack published a monograph on Sanja Iveković and edited Agency, Ambivalence, Analysis. Approaching the Museum with Migration in Mind. In 2002/3, she served as President of the Austrian AICA.

This program is presented with support from the Department of Art and Art History Visiting Artist Lecture Series. Special thanks to Penny Aaron and Paggi House at the Loren Hotel, Austin.