Mary Ellen Carroll: How To Talk Dirty and Influence People

Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH) is excited to present Mary Ellen Carroll: How To Talk Dirty and Influence People, the first major museum exhibition to survey over four decades of work by acclaimed conceptual artist Mary Ellen Carroll. The exhibition charts the import and impact of Carroll’s exploration of some of the most urgent issues of our time, including environmentalism, architectural and technological infrastructure, immigration, and urban legislation, as well as the artist’s engagement with questions of sexuality, identity, and being. 

Mary Ellen Carroll works across various mediums including performance, photography, architecture, writing, video, public art, and policy. In no way comprehensive, this list attests to what is often described as the multidisciplinary and heterogenous nature of their work, its tendency to incorporate modes of working we traditionally associate with other fields such as law; anthropology; and social, political, and natural sciences, as well as the artist’s use of a wide, though highly specific, range of materials. 

At the heart of Carroll’s work is one fundamental question: What do we consider to be a work of art? This question emphasizes the expansive and exploratory nature of their approach. Often highly collaborative and research based, Carroll’s work develops over years of planning and coordination. Process is central in the making a work and encompasses every aspect of its materialization—from its initial conceptualization in writing to the labor that goes into its making. 

The title of this exhibition, Mary Ellen Carroll: How To Talk Dirty and Influence People, emphasizes the equally irreverent and incisive nature of Carroll’s work and is drawn from famed comedian and rabble-rouser Lenny Bruce’s 1965 autobiography of the same name. Like Bruce’s caustic societal critiques, Carroll’s work addresses our most pressing issues with wry intellect, unflinching candor, and a tricksterism that traffics in, and ultimately reveals the underpinnings of physical, social, economic, and ideological structures.

Carroll’s work tests the elasticity of art and its institutions. But the artist’s scrutiny of bureaucracies, their policies, procedures, and administration, is not limited to arts organizations. Carroll has taken aim at governmental agencies, zoning ordinances, intellectual property, and climate conferences. They have rotated a post-war home 180 degrees, proposed putting rabbit ears on a Confederate monument to transform it into a functional wireless transmitter, dropped, exhumed, and buried a stolen 1987 Buick Regal in the middle of the woods in upstate New York, and trademarked the word “NOTHING,” all of which attests to their capacity to bind criticality and humor. 

The exhibition highlights the multifaceted work of an artist who has demonstrated deft institutional critiques of art and used their artwork to interact with and question the politics and policies surrounding social, physical, and ideological structures. Mary Ellen Carroll: How To Talk Dirty and Influence People offers the occasion to reconsider Carroll’s work and the value that political and social activism informed by humor might offer contemporary critical practices.

Mary Ellen Carroll: How To Talk Dirty and Influence People is organized by Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and curated by Rebecca Matalon, Senior Curator, with Yiran Chi, 2025-2026 Rice University Curatorial Fellow.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue co-published by CAMH and Dancing Foxes Press and designed by Teo Schifferli, and featuring new scholarship by exhibition curator Rebecca Matalon, art historian Pamela M. Lee, and historian of science, D. Graham Burnett; reprinted and/or expanded interviews between Carroll and Hamza Walker and scholar David Joselit; as well as poetry and prose by Iman Mersal and Kathryn Scanlan.

Major support for Mary Ellen Carroll: How To Talk Dirty and Influence People is provided by Teiger Foundation with sustainability efforts guided by Rute Collaborative as part of Teiger Foundation’s Climate Action for Curators.

Additional support is provided by N2 Stone Foundation, the Stolbun Family, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Frank Liu Jr. Foundation, Michael and Katie Russell, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and Martha Claire Tompkins.