Mary Ellen Strom will be an International Fulbright Scholar from September 2012 through May 2013, conducting a project on the border of Sonora, Mexico and Arizona.
Mary Ellen Strom is an artist who produces projects that unearth submerged narratives in the environment, history and cultural discourse. These projects that culminate in performance video installations are pursued and generated through multiple disciplines in the humanities and sciences, interrogating place and its inhabitants.
Strom works both in the studio and the field. Originally from Butte, Montana, she maintains a studio in Boston, MA and often pursues fieldwork in the American West. The fieldwork is committed to a collaborative method that engages in democratic processes with non-artists. The work is invested in an expanded notion of community that is not people-centric, but includes humans, soil, water, plants and animals.
Working primarily in video, Strom iterates on her subjects using the language and history of visual and performing arts. The disciplines of drawing, painting, sculpture and dance are the bedrock languages from which the work speaks. These languages are used to generate an embodied understanding of place and culture using movement, visual signs and metaphors.
Drawing on methods from performance studies, cultural geography, feminist and queer studies the work presents a frame for new insights to form. Strom uses these methods to push the potential for art to perform with substance and conscience.
Strom's work has been exhibited in a wide range of contexts including museums, galleries, passenger trains, large-scale video projections onto industrial sites and mountain rock faces, in empty retail stores and horse arenas. She has received recent awards including a 2012 International Fulbright Scholar Fellowship, a Bogliasco Fellowship to the Liguria Study Center for the Arts and Humanities, the MAP Fund, supported by the Doris Duke and Andrew W. Mellon Foundations; Artadia; the Fund for Art and Dialogue; the Augustus Saint-Gaudens Memorial Fellowship Prize; Art Matters; Creative Capital among others. Strom's individual installations and collaborative projects have been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles; the ICA Philadelphia; the Contemporary Art Museum Houston; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA; Museum of Modern Art, NYC;, the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art; the Currier Museum, Manchester, NH among others. Strom has participated in residencies including PS1/MoMA; Lower Manhattan Cultural Council; the International Studio and Curatorial Program; the Headlands Center for the Arts and Bellagio Center Lake Como, Italy funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. Teaching is a core element to Strom's artistic practice. She is honored to be on the faculty of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
