Mary Ellen Strom
Jamaica Plain, MA
Mary Ellen Strom’s work includes video installations, single channel video, performance, and public art projects. Her work is project based and is most often temporal. Strom’s single channel videos and installations have been presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Museum of Modern Art, NYC, The Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, The Chicago Art Institute, The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Kansas City Art Institute, The High Museum, Atlanta, Diverseworks, Houston, TX, Archa, Theatro Divaldo, Prague, Republic of Czech, Museo de Arte, Mexico City, Temple Bar, Dublin, Ireland, Ars Electronica Festival, Linz Austria, Chapter Art Centre, Cardiff Wales among others. Strom has received numerous awards including the Rockefeller Foundation, M.A.P. Grants, New York State Council on the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, National Alliance for Media and Culture, and two New York Performance Awards (Bessie) for “Outstanding Creative Achievement”. Strom was a 1999-2000 artist in the P.S.1 / MoMA National Studio Program. She received her MFA from the University of California, Irvine and is an instructor at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Girls
Mary Ellen Strom
Artist BioThe Girls project was presented at the High Museum in Atlanta, GA. Produced by Mary Ellen Strom with eleven girls ages 13-17, the installation used the context of the museum to speak about the girl’s position in our culture, their bodies as sites of political struggle (which they experience daily), their individual ideas about ways they wish to be seen and heard, and their survival. The young women stood on pedestals and performed stepping sequences while video was projected onto the many surfaces of the museum’s atrium. The work involved time-based elements that occurred simultaneously and cyclically over a two hour time frame creating the opportunity for the images, ideas, and voices within the works to intersect and collide. The installation was designed for the audience to walk through, as opposed to experiencing it from its edges.