Park McArthur: Contact M

This exhibition of artist Park McArthur (born 1984, North Carolina, US) brings together, for the first time, artworks made between the 2010s and 2020s. Co-organized by mumok in Vienna and Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, the exhibition is a collaboration between both institutions and will be presented simultaneously at both locations. Questions of simultaneous experience and access to art and culture shape this project’s format and purpose.

Contact M serves as an occasion to consider McArthur’s practice and presence among a recent generation of artists whose materialist and institutionally-responsive strategies refuse to separate critique from imagination.

Introduced to a wider public with her solo exhibition of temporary ramps, disabled parking signage, and Wikipedia entry on disabled writer and activist Marta Russell (Ramps, 2014), McArthur’s work has been the subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions. Since then, processes of degeneration and dependency, as experiences filled with aesthetic possibility and formal invention, have been central to McArthur’s practice.

The impossibility of experiencing the exhibition in its entirety is one of this multi-sited project’s propositions. By closely aligning each museum’s presentation and attempting to make the same show in more than one place at once, the exhibition confronts hierarchies of singularity, individuality, independence, and personhood.

A more distant, but by no means less consequential means of experiencing the exhibition is via a new artwork that takes the form of a text and audio guide. Available onsite at the museums as well as on Museum Abteiberg’s and mumok’s websites for download and streaming, this guide is another means of presenting over a decade of artwork in more than one place simultaneously. The guide’s text will also be published as part of the exhibition’s forthcoming German-English catalog. This catalog, the artist’s first, sustains and extends the exhibition via descriptive documentation and a reference list of artworks and writing spanning 2008–2025.

Park McArthur, born 1984 Raleigh, North Carolina, US, studied studio art and Chinese language at Davidson College, North Carolina, sculpture in the MFA program at The University of Miami, Florida, and attended the Whitney Independent Study Program and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Previously McArthur has taught at The New School for Social Research, New York, Abrons Art Center, New York, Rutgers University, New Jersey, and Leuphana University, Lüneberg, Germany. Past solo exhibitions include Leuphana University, Lüneburg, Germany, Paid, Seattle, Washington, both 2023, Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland, 2020, Maxwell Graham, New York, 2013, 2014, 2020, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2018, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California, 2017, Chisenhale Gallery, London, UK, 2016, Lars Friedrich, Berlin, Germany, 2014, Yale Union, with Alex Fleming, Portland, Oregon, 2014, Galerie Catherine Bastide, Brussels, Belgium, 2013. McArthur participated in the 2021 Oxygen Biennial, Tbilisi, Georgia, the 57th Edition of the Carnegie International, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 2018, the Whitney Biennial 78th edition, New York, 2017, the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil, 2016, and Greater New York, 4th edition, MoMA PS 1, Queens, New York, 2015.
With Constantina Zavitsanos McArthur has published essays and exhibited artworks in group exhibitions held at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, California and Tensta Konsthall, Sweden, both 2024, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany, 2021, Gebert Foundation, Rapperswil, Switzerland, 2020, Charlotte Street Foundation, Kansas City, Missouri and L’Espace Arlaud, Lausanne, Switzerland, both 2017.

In 2015 McArthur and Jennifer Burris edited Beverly Buchanan: 1978–1981, focused on Buchanan’s earthworks and sculptures from that time, which was followed by a thirty-year survey of Buchanan’s work held at the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York and the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, Georgia, 2017–2018. With Constantina Zavitsanos, Arika, Amalle Dublon, Jerron Herman, Carolyn Lazard, Michelle Lisa Polissaint, Alice Sheppard, Madison Zalopany, and numerous collaborators, McArthur is part of I wanna be with you everywhere, a series of gatherings of, by, and for disabled artists.

Opening festivities will take place March 14, 2025 at 7pm in Vienna and Mönchengladbach. A ticket from one museum gains admission to the other.

Curated by Matthias Michalka, mumok—Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien and Susanne Titz and Alke Heykes, Museum Abteiberg, Möchengladbach

Venues
mumok—Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien
Museumsplatz 1, 1070 Vienna, Austria

Museum Abteiberg, Möchengladbach
Abteistraße 27, 41061 Mönchengladbach, Germany

*Image description: The web address of a wikipedia page on Marta Russell adhered to the top of a window looking out onto a fall yard scene. Potted house plants on an empty table sit in front of the window.