Tourmaline

Kindly donated by the artist and Chapter, New York

In Mary of Ill Fame, Tourmaline builds a fictionalized story centered around Mary Jones, a black, trans, sex worker who lived in New York in the 1830s. Set within historical Seneca Village—a free Black land-owning community that was destroyed for the development of Central Park—the film provides a counter- history for a black trans community that has been largely erased from mainstream accounts.

Tourmaline is an artist, filmmaker, writer, and activist whose practice highlights the experiences of Black, queer, and trans communities and their capacity to impact the world. Her films and photographs rewrite mainstream narratives and cultural histories to initiate a paradigm shift and imagine a more pleasure-filled future. Tourmaline’s practice invites us to fundamentally reshape our beliefs about what is possible.

Tourmaline (b. 1983, Roxbury, Massachusetts) lives and works in New York, NY. She received her BA from Columbia University in 2006. Tourmaline had her first solo exhibition at Chapter NY, New York, in 2020. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the 7th Athens Biennale 2021 ECLIPSE, Athens; the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn; The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx; MoMA PS1, Long Island City; The High Line, New York; The Kitchen, New York; BFI Flare, London; Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR; BAM Cinematek, Brooklyn; The New Museum, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; MOCA, Los Angeles; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago.

Tourmaline’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn; the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; and the Tate, London.

Tourmaline‘s work is currently included in the 59th International Art Exhibition: The Milk of Dreams, curated by Cecilia Alemani at La Biennale di Venezia; Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Critical Fabulations at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Mountain/Time at the Aspen Museum of Art, Aspen, CO; and 52 Artists: Revisiting a Feminist Milestone at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT.