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BIOGRAPHY
Matt Bodett is an artist, writer, and cultural organizer based in Chicago. His work has been presented at the Poetry Foundation, Steppenwolf Theatre, the Freud Museum London, and the No Limits Festival in Berlin, and he has been an artist in residence at MacDowell and Surf Point. He is the founder and director of the Center for Mad Culture, an artist-led organization that produces exhibitions, public programs, publications, and archives centering mad and disabled communities. Bodett serves on the Artists Council for 3Arts, is a board member of Good Hart Artists Residency, and has worked as a juror for the Ohio Arts Council’s Disability Grant and other arts organizations. In 2025, he will be a Disability Lead Fellow, continuing his commitment to disability justice and mad-led cultural work.
STATEMENT: Matt Bodett’s artwork treats madness as a cultural presence rather than a condition to be corrected. He works across painting, books, print, and performance, often by directly altering historical images, texts, and formats drawn from Western art history and psychiatric archives. His process involves overwriting, erasure, annotation, and reuse, placing contemporary mad experience into direct contact with inherited cultural authority. Through the Center for Mad Culture, this approach extends beyond the studio into exhibitions, publications, talks, and archives that foreground mad and disabled authorship. The work shows how memory is produced through material acts of revision, who controls those acts, and how mad knowledge persists when it is allowed to speak in its own terms.
Disability - Madness
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