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

 

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

 

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

 

Ugh was a co-founder of the semi-anonymous performance & curatorial collective, Hexus & an adjunct professor of Art History at Colorado State University. She is currently a staff art writer for DARIA Magazine & a research fellow for the University of Denver Art Collections. They hold a BA from the University of New Orleans, & two MAs—one from New York University & the other from the University of Denver.