For the last nine years I have explored different strategies and media to ‘make art politically.’ These activities paralleled shifts in my own political self-definitions. The AIDS crisis and the mobilizing impact it had on many lesbian and gay communities coincided with my own decisions to make lesbian/queer identity as a central place from which to move politically. As a lesbian, I am deeply concerned with the issue of visibility: in politics, culture, media, and art and in representations of sexuality. At the same time, I am well aware of the problems and dangers posed by one-dimensional identity politics. Although art cannot resolve the dilemmas created by politics or history, and can merely point to them, I think art can be educational without being didactic, political without being reductionist, subversive on many different levels, yet subtle enough to act as an interloper.” M.P.

1951	born
1971	Rhode Island School of Design, Providence
1973	B.F.A. Kansas City Art Institute, MO
1992	M.F.A. University of Illinois at Chicago
	Adjunct faculty, School of the Art Institute of Chicago; lives in Chicago, IL