Mary Mattingly

Mary Mattingly

Mary Mattingly is a visual artist. She founded Swale, an edible landscape on a barge in New York City to circumvent public land laws that make it illegal to pick food on public land. Swale co-created the "foodway", a permanent edible landscape in Concrete Plant Park, the Bronx in 2017. The "foodway" is the first time New York City Parks is allowing people to publicly forage in over 100 years. Mary is currently the Artist-in-Residence at the Brooklyn Public Library building an ‘Ecotopian Library’. She recently completed a sculpture Pull with the International Havana Biennial with the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de la Habana and the Bronx Museum of the Arts, currently at the Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade. 

In 2018 she worked with BRIC Arts to build What Happens After which involved dismantling a military vehicle and deconstructing its mineral supply chain, focusing on the mineral cobalt. Mary led a similar project at the Museum of Modern Art. Her work has also been exhibited at Storm King, the International Center of Photography, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Palais de Tokyo. It has been included in books such as Whitechapel MIT Press Documents of Contemporary Art series titled Nature, and Henry Sayre’s A World of Art, published by Pearson Education Inc.

Mary's new work, Vanishing Point, is commissioned as part of Estuary 2021 through a partnership between Focal Point Gallery and Metal, with additional funding from Essex 2020 and The National Lottery Community Fund, and supported by local organisations The Old Waterworks and Grrrl Zine Fair.


Instagram: @marymattingly
Facebook: mary.mattingly.39

Estuary Festival is supported by

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