Mary Grace Bernard

(MG, she/they/ugh)

Mary Grace Bernard (MG, she/they/ugh) is a transdisciplinary artist, educator, advocate, and crip witch. They explore the material and immaterial realities of disability, the living dead, queerness, cyborgism, crip time, post-humanness, spirituality, madness, care, dependency, and the boundaries between the personal and political spheres of existence.

Ugh seeks to dissolve binary thinking while converging otherwise invisible communities and their stories.

Bernard’s work is conceptual, personal, socially engaged, deeply researched, and contemplative. From staged photography to found-object sculpture, digital video to curation, performance to art writing, ugh chooses media per its ability to communicate directly with her audiences.

Through her transmedia artworks, they turn art visitors into active, empathetic spectators of her painful and time-consuming care routines. Bernard’s work pulls from various historical contexts to reimagine traditional narratives for a more equitable future.

In 2017, they launched the artist-run nonprofit Femme Salée (F&S) which is dedicated to starting, sharing, and making difficult conversations frequently absent from the art world accessible. Since 2020, F&S has published ten zine issues (online and in print) and two art journal issues (online only)—Pain Worth Sharing and Care & Dependency—focused on specific themes that celebrate marginalized perspectives.

Ugh was a co-founder of the semi-anonymous performance and curatorial collective, Hexus, an adjunct professor of Art History at Colorado State University, and a staff art writer for DARIA Magazine. She is currently a co-founder of the Colorado Crip Collective and a board member of Tilt West. They hold a BA from the University of New Orleans, and two MAs—one from New York University and the other from the University of Denver.