MC Coble (born Mary Coble) is a queer American artist who works in Washington, DC and uses they/them pronouns.Hengel, Louis van den. “Archives of Affect: Performance, Reenactment, and the Becoming of Memory.” In László Munteán, Liedeke Plate, and Anneke Smelik (Eds) ''Materializing Memory in Art and Popular Culture'' (pp. 125-142). New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2017. Coble was born in 1978 and is from

Julian, North Carolina Julian is an unincorporated community in southern Guilford County, North Carolina, United States. It lies along North Carolina Highway 62, just east of U.S. Route 421. It is southeast of the center of Greensboro and northwest of Liberty Libert ...

. Coble received their Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 2001. They then went on to receive their Master of Fine Arts from The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. in 2004. They originally began their art career as a photographer but later turned their attention to performance art. Their most notable works are ''Note to Self'' (2005) and ''Blood Script'' (2008).

Installations and performances

''Note to Self'' was a performance piece by MC Coble which was performed September 2, 2005 at the Connor Contemporary Art Gallery in Washington D.C. The performance consisted of MC Coble sitting on a chair with their back turned to the audience while being tattooed with the names of victims of LGBTQ related hate crimes. For the solo performance, Coble collected 436 names of gay, lesbian, bi, and transgender individuals that died due to hate crimes. These tattoos were done without ink so each name was visible in blood. After each tattoo, the blood was imprinted on a sheet of paper. The entire performance lasted 12 hours. ''Deferral'', performed and installed at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC in 2013, addressed

FDA The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA or US FDA) is a federal agency of the Department of Health and Human Services. The FDA is responsible for protecting and promoting public health through the control and supervision of food s ...

regulations banning men who have had sex with other men from donating blood since 1977. Coble collected slogans for blood donation campaigns and printed them on separation screens. Coble had blood drawn on site and then used it to paint the word deferral in

Morse code Morse code is a method used in telecommunication to encode text characters as standardized sequences of two different signal durations, called ''dots'' and ''dashes'', or ''dits'' and ''dahs''. Morse code is named after Samuel Morse, one of ...

on the screens. When asked in an interview with The Huffington Post about why they chose to do a performance on this topic, Coble responded that it is "...an interest in queer issues of social injustice threads throughout my work. The White House is across from The

Corcoran Corcoran is an Irish surname, the original Irish language form being meaning 'descendant of Corcrán'. The name itself is derived from meaning 'purple'. History The name Corcoran is an anglicisation of the names of two Gaelic clans. The f ...

as is the Red Cross-- and so everything just came together." Coble says of their performances,"It is not about hurting myself. It's the only way I can think to express these ideas that my audience will have a strong enough connection to." ''Blood Script'' was a performance piece by MC Coble which was performed in 2008 at the PULSE art fair in New York City. MC Coble had 75 hateful words tattooed onto their body without ink. These 75 words were taken from over 200 words used previously in other performances. These performances were titled MARKER and were performed in New York in 2006, in Washington D.C. in 2007, and Madrid in 2008. The words were tattooed in a decorative font and appeared on their body in blood. After being tattooed, each insult was captured by placing a sheet of paper over the blood, creating an imprint which was then displayed on the gallery wall.Steorn, Patrik. “Curating Queer Heritage: Queer Knowledge and Museum Practice.” Wiley Online Library. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, July 16, 2012. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.2151-6952.2012.00159.x.

Installations and performances

References

Further reading