Mary Grace Bernard (MG, she/her) is a transmedia and performance artist, educator, advocate, and crip witch. Her practice finds itself at the intersection of performance art, transmedia installation art, art scholarship, art writing, curation, and activism. Exploring seemingly separate fields like the material and immaterial realities of (dis)ability, the living dead, queerness, cyborgism, crip time, post-humanness, spirituality, madness, care, dependency, and the boundaries between the personal and political spheres of existence, she seeks to dissolve binary thinking while converging otherwise invisible communities and their stories.

 

Bernard’s work is conceptual, personal, socially engaged, deeply researched, and contemplative. From staged photography to found-object sculpture, digital video to curation, performance to art writing, she chooses media per its ability to communicate directly with her audiences. Through her transmedia artworks, she turns art visitors into active, empathetic spectators of her painful and time-consuming care routines. MG’s work pulls from various historical contexts to reimagine traditional narratives for a more equitable future.

 

In 2017, MG launched the digital contemporary art platform Femme Salée (F&S) which is dedicated to starting, sharing, and making accessible difficult conversations frequently absent from the art world. Since 2020, F&S has self-published four zine issues (online and in print) and one art journal issue (online only)—Pain Worth Sharing—focused on specific discourses that exemplify unique perspectives.

 

She is a co-founder of the semi-anonymous performance and curatorial collective, Hexus, a staff art writer for DARIA Magazine, an adjunct professor of Art History at Colorado State University, and an art collections assistant at the University of Denver. She holds a BA from the University of New Orleans, and two MAs—one from New York University and the other from the University of Denver.