About
Mary Mattingly
Art is everything. It’s love and it’s longing, it slows time and asks people to dream.
Mary Mattingly is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist whose work spans public sculpture and photography with a focus on water. She co-builds absurd ecosystems and layered collages suggesting riparian futures.
Biography
Mary Mattingly is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist whose work spans large-scale public sculpture, ecological installation, collage-based photography, and social practice. Her practice centers on the relationships between bodies, water, and land. Mattingly focuses on these issues through the absurd, whether building an edible forest on a barge or bundling her possessions into boulders.
Mattingly is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow. Works are held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the New York Public Library; the Milwaukee Art Museum; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art; and other public institutions. She is the founder of Swale (2016–2020), a floating food forest that drew more than 340,000 visitors to New York City’s public piers and catalyzed the city’s first 24-hour edible public space.
Her current project, Floating Garden, is a barge-based living commons commissioned by the inaugural Medina Triennial. Mattingly’s work has been exhibited internationally at venues including Socrates Sculpture Park, the International Center of Photography, Storm King Art Center, and Palais de Tokyo. Her work has been featured in Art21, The New York Times, Artforum, The New Yorker, and Le Monde.
Her work is represented by Robert Mann Gallery, New York.
I was raised in an agricultural town near Springfield, Massachusetts, where the local drinking water was contaminated by agricultural chemicals. That experience shaped my understanding of clean water as both increasingly rare and a fundamental right, and it deepened my resolve to protect it.