Mary Walling Blackburn will discuss "Cream Psychosis." She will be joined in conversation by Salma Shamel. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion.About the book: The lumpen and the miscreant walk a long, long way together into a bar. That bar is a landmass, is an empire, is an institution, is a painter, is insistent laughter through death. Deep gallows (sometimes humor) built for survival. The lumpen are kin to that famous glom of the proletariat. The miscreant treads earth in overlapping circles.
This book of essays, written by the artist Mary Walling Blackburn between the 2010s and the present, moves with near-psychedelic precision across American time and its surrounding spaces.
Paul Chan observes that "Walling Blackburn writes like an artist as alchemist. She draws from philosophies, histories, and ideas into wildly vivid and combustible forms that read like nothing else. Her writings radiate with incantatory power."
Facing a spiraling empire, Blackburn insists on showing volumes of teeming, vibrant, life. The essays and works collected here are movies of America in parallax view.
About the author: Mary Walling Blackburn is a co-founder of Anhoek School (2008-2013), a collective education experiment dedicated to collapsing class and imploding gender which included WMYN, its pirate feminist radio station. Walling Blackburn's writing has appeared in Afterall, Art in America, Bomb Magazine, Cabinet Magazine, e-flux journal, Grey Room, Triple Canopy, and other journals and magazines. Walling Blackburn’s writing has been included in multiple anthologies including Social Medium: Artists Writing, 2000–2015, (Paper Monument, 2016). Quaestiones Perversas, (Pioneer Works, 2017), co-written with Dr. Beatriz E. Balanta, functions as a poetic rupture of standardized testing. Her new collection of essays, "Cream Psychosis," (e-flux/Sternberg Press) was published in March 2026.
About the interlocutor: Salma Shamel is a writer and scholar working at the intersection of critical theory, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and Arab intellectual history. She received her PhD from New York University in August and is currently a Collegiate Assistant Professor and Harper Schmidt Fellow at the University of Chicago. Her writing has appeared in Parapraxis, Endnotes, Social Text, Rethinking Marxism, and Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, among others.
Event Venue
5751 S Woodlawn Ave, Chicago, IL, United States, Illinois 60637
Tickets
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