MARY BABCOCK

mary babcock portfolio collage

MARY BABCOCK

(fiber & performance)
Associate Professor, Fiber Area Chair & Graduate Chair
Office Room 358 / mbabcock@hawaii.edu

marybabcock.com

BIO
Mary Babcock is a visual and performance artist whose work explores mending and its relationship to personal and cultural change. She is deeply interested in the intersection of art, contemplation and social activism, engaging “making” as a tool for illuminating implicit knowledge of our humanity and compassion. Her work is resonant with eastern philosophy; it embodies a form of social activism that treats the inner landscape as inherently connected to its outer manifestation and as a central site for peacebuilding.

Babcock’s installation, fiber and mixed media work has been exhibited regionally, nationally and internationally, including Korea, Japan, Canada, France, Hungary and the Ukraine. She has performed across the United States and throughout Japan in individual and collaborative contexts, as well as in Italy, Poland and the Philippines. She is the recipient of the Bronze Award in Fiber at the Cheongju International Craft Competition: The Breath of Nature. Her work is driven by a need to understand, critique and speak about her culture, and is rooted in the desire to bridge two prevailing paradigms for art-making: art as beauty and art social criticism. She has lectured at numerous conferences on her work linking fiber, performance and peace and justice studies.

EDUCATION
MFA – University of Arizona
BFA – University of Oregon
MA/PhD – University of Pennsylvania
BA – Cornell University

RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS
Exhibitions include Biennial X, Honolulu Museum of Art/Spalding House, Threshold: Sustainable Art Project at the Ueno Town Museum, Tokyo, Japan and solo exhibitions at the Anna Leonowens Gallery, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada and the Textile Arts Center, Brooklyn, NY. Performance venues include: M:ST Mountain Standard Time Performative Art Festival, Calgary, Canada, ]Performance space[, London, UK, TAMA ’08 (Tupada Action and Media Art) 5th Tupada International Art Event (Philippines) and the 12th NIPAF (Nippon Performance Art Festival) Asian Performance Art Series ’07: Asia Meets Hawaii and Central Europe, Tokyo/Nagoya/Gyoda/Nagano, Japan

COURSES TAUGHT
ART 237 (Woven Structures)
ART 238 (Fiber Forms)
ART 338 (Installation/Performance)
ART 339 (Designing Surface)
ART 400 (Special Topics: Use, Reuse and Radical Reuse)
ART 410 (BFA Seminar)
ART 611-614 (MFA Seminar)