Mary Lum

Mary Lum is a visual artist whose intricate collages, paintings, photographs, and murals explore the margins of city life, the history of abstraction, and the use of text as image. Originally commissioned for the exhibition, The Moving Parts (&) at Johnson-Kulukundis Family Gallery, Byerly Hall, Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Mary Lum’s work draws inspiration from Corita Kent’s archive held at the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America. Using the archiveas visual and formal source material, Lum, like Kent, engages in a practice of deep looking, collecting and scouring everyday sites for visual inspiration. Kent and Lum both cut, layer and reverse text, drawing attention to shape, pattern and repetition often rendering the text itself illegible.