MC Carey

MC Carey (they/them) is a 28-year old self-taught printmaker, illustrator, and community educator living and making on Piscataway-Conoy land also known as Baltimore City. Born and raised in Columbia, MD it wasn’t until MC was a senior in college, taking their first art class since middle school, that they found a love for creating visual art. After exploring traditional intaglio printmaking for two semesters, MC was determined to continue with an art practice in their post-college life. After graduation, MC entered the world of gender-based violence working for a local Rape Crisis and Intimate Partner Violence agency. The work was so deeply powerful, heartbreaking, and impactful on MC as a survivor. To stay committed to the work and to their own healing journey, MC started to teach themself linoleum block printing. The medium stuck to them immediately and became an essential way for them to process the intensity of their work. Fast-forward six years and MC is a full-time printmaker running their own printshop called Femme Prints. MC has shown artwork in 10+ galleries and group shows including the Peale Museum, facilitated 15+ printmaking workshops, and has vended at over 100 art shows/markets. Their passion is sharing their craft with the world, and more so having a healing impact on those who engage with their work.

Through MC’s print studio, Femme Prints, they create hand-carved linoleum block prints largely inspired by their artistic root as a healing artist working with survivors of gender-based violence. With a flair for storytelling through detailed and delicate block prints, MC often roots their creativity in natural symbolism, afro whimsy, body liberation, and radical joy and healing. MC creates texture-filled block prints that urge the viewer to explore what joy, peace, and liberation looks like in their own body and life while exploring themes that show up in their own life. MC is also moved to create expansive and textural block prints that help explore their relationship with their own relationship to self and family. Using traditional relief printmaking techniques, MC creates artwork that explores ancestral healing through the oral, written and imagined histories of their ancestors as a Black American and Jewish person.

MC believes that the role of the artist is to reflect the world back to itself in real and imagined ways. Through this reflection, real change is possible and that change is the only constant truth in this world. Every creation has, without a doubt, the ability to impact those who witness it. MC’s belief is that artwork is rooted in the capacity for the world to change for the better; that value comes from the artist’s admiration for Author, Octavia E. Butler, who wrote in her book Parable of the Sower: “All that you touch you change. All that you change, changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change.” Artwork allows for community to explore change through the lens of creativity, one of the greatest tools for changing the world. MC hopes to be a part of that change, one carving at a time, using stories from the past and creating stories of the future to reflect a reality rich with the possibility of healing and rewilding towards Liberation.