The Lumpen and the Miscreant: Mary Walling Blackburn presents Cream Psychosis, in conversation with David Levine

Thursday, May 14, 6:00–7:30PM, Theater, Lower Level 

“When an empire is lurching to a halt at its very end, it might be the moment when it begins, or is forced, to re-imagine its relationship to a national insanity.” —Mary Walling Blackburn

“XOXO, Insanity, Institution” (2011) 

The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts and MIT List Visual Arts Center co-present a reading of Cream Psychosis (Sternberg Press, e-flux Journal, 2026), a collection of essays spanning the 2010s to the present  by artist and writer Mary Walling Blackburn, followed by a conversation between Walling Blackburn and artist and writer David Levine. 

Moving with near psychedelic precision across American time and its surrounding spaces, Cream Psychosis begins near the annals of the Arkansas Lunatic Asylum, March 1883. In the 1990s, a scholarship kid meanders with inescapable difficulty through Northeastern boarding schools. Conspiring sugar planters, descendants of missionaries, overthrow Indigenous Hawai’i in 1893. A child learns how to split screens: hard core film, documentary, destruction, and queer care in both 1970s Times Square and 1980s Salt Lake City SROs. Archeological digs, nuclear plants, and horrors of predation collide. California crumbles through the decades into the smog and sea. In 2020, all over, protestors meet BORTAC-trained soldiers under skies choked with propellers and noxious propellants. By 2025, peach pits, trench art, and war waste heap together.

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. —Kaye Caine-Nielsen

Adapted from the introduction to Cream Psychosis (2026) 

Copies of the book will be available for sale at the event from the MIT Press Bookstore.

This event is organized by Marina Caron, Assistant Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center and Danni Shen, Senior Curatorial and Public Programs Assistant, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts.

Free and open to the public, please register here. 

Mary Walling Blackburn is an artist and writer, whose work engages a wide spectrum of materials that probe and intensify the historic, ecological, and class-born brutalities of North American life. She was the co-founder of Anhoek School (2008-2013) (and its affiliated pirate feminist radio station, WMYN), a collective education experiment that was dedicated to collapsing class and imploding gender. Walling Blackburn's writing has appeared in Grey Room, Cabinet , Tammawuj, BOMB, Afterall, and Art in America, amongst others. The book Quaestiones Perversas (Pioneer Works, 2017)—a poetic examination of standardized testing—was co-written by Dr. Beatriz E. Balanta and Walling Blackburn, and included in the group exhibition Shifter (2016) at Art in General, New York. Walling Blackburn’s book of essays, Cream Psychosis, was co-published by Sternberg Press and e-flux Journal in 2026.

David Levine's work encompasses theater, performance, video and photography. His performance and exhibition work have been presented by the Museum of the Moving Image, Jeu de Paume, the Brooklyn Museum, Creative Time, MoMA, REDCAT, PS122, and the Boston MFA, and has been featured in Artforum, Frieze, Theater, BOMB, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. He has also directed operas and plays at BRIC House, the Atlantic Theater, Primary Stages and Soho Rep.

His essays and dramatic writing have been published in n+1, Theater, Cabinet, Parkett, and Triple Canopy. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and OBIE award, in addition to fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute, MacDowell, and the Foundation for Contemporary Art.