Mary Ellen Carroll: How To Talk Dirty and Influence People

Mary Ellen Carroll is showing at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston through November 1, in the Brown Foundation Gallery. The exhibition is titled How To Talk Dirty and Influence People, and it's the first major solo museum survey of her work.

Carroll is a New York-based conceptual artist who's been working for more than four decades across performance, film, photography, writing, architecture, public art, and policy. Her practice centers on one question: what do we consider to be a work of art? The work emphasizes duration and resists completion, treating uncertainty, risk, and contradiction as generative conditions, and it holds up humor, negotiation, and persistence as tools for reshaping social reality.

The retrospective spans a wide range of her output. It runs from The Doppelganger Tapes (1993–ongoing), a series of doppelganger recordings, to a polar bear suit she once used to scale a Memphis smokestack. It includes Federal (2003), which takes a close look at Charles Luckman's Federal Building in Los Angeles. One of her landmark projects, prototype 180 (1999–ongoing), is sited right here in Houston's Sharpstown neighborhood; it staged the 180-degree rotation of a mid-century suburban house in 2010 and its subsequent "unbuilding" in 2017.

Rebecca Matalon curated the show with 2025-26 Rice Curatorial Fellow Yiran Chi, and Juliana Ziebell handled the exhibition design. The show is accompanied by a catalogue co-published by CAMH and Dancing Foxes Press. The exhibition runs from May 22 through November 1, 2026, at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.