EventsThe New Social Environment#1365
Mary Ellen Carroll: How To Talk Dirty and Influence People
Featuring Carroll and Chloe Stagaman, with Kathryn Scanlan
Wednesday, June 3, 2026 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific
These free events are produced by The Brooklyn Rail.
Artist Mary Ellen Carroll joins Rail Director of Programs Chloe Stagaman for a conversation on Zoom. We conclude with a reading by Kathryn Scanlan.
Mary Ellen Carroll
Photo by Pedro Alejandro Hernandez
Mary Ellen Carroll / MEC, studios is a conceptual artist based in NYC. All work begins with the question: What do we consider to be a work of art? For more than four decades, Carroll has engaged visual media, policy, architecture, and writing as materials responsive to social, political, and aesthetic conditions. Their first career survey, Mary Ellen Carroll: How To Talk Dirty and Influence People opens May 21, 2026 at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. Carroll co-founded DYKWTCA (Do You Know Where the Children Are?, 2018); developed/piloted RSVP (Please Respond 2022), supporting unaccompanied immigrant youth through acculturative engagement with Terra Firma and the Illumination Fund.
Chloe Stagaman
Chloe Stagaman is a Brooklyn-based curator and writer. Since 2022, she has been the Director of Programs at the Brooklyn Rail, where she organizes the journal’s weekday conversation series The New Social Environment.
Kathryn Scanlan
Kathryn Scanlan is the author of Aug 9—Fog, The Dominant Animal and Kick the Latch. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, the Iowa Review Award, the Gordon Burn Prize, the Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction, a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and fellowships from MacDowell, the Jan Michalski Foundation and the European Capital of Culture program in Chemnitz, Germany. A new novel is forthcoming in 2027.
We’d like to thank The Marion Boulton Kippy Stroud Foundation and Teiger Foundation for making these conversations possible, and for their support of our growing archive 🌈✨