Mallory Kimmel
Repackaging Reality: The Sensation of Touching a Cloud, 2026
Plastic, mirror, nano diffusers
I examine how design shapes systems of power, care, and belonging through an experimental practice of object-making, furniture, performance, publishing, and social practice. These interactive media create circumstances that invite people to gather, slow down, and reconsider the social conventions embedded in everyday design. Humor and speculation often serve as entry points, allowing familiar objects and rituals to reveal the assumptions they carry about labor, efficiency, and human value. Grounded in the tradition of social sculpture, my practice considers the built environment as a site where cultural values are reinforced, contested, and reimagined.
I develop speculative designs that prototype alternative ways of relating to objects and people that forgo the lonely lifestyle of consumerist individualism for relational living. These works invite participants to inhabit possible futures in which care, rest, and collective well-being are co-created through the process of remembering. Humor, play, and experimentation with abjection become methods for revealing the assumptions embedded within everyday objects, rituals, and spaces while opening new possibilities for how they might function. Unpacking the choreographies of designed objects through these methods illustrates how they are instrumental in upholding socio-political control and exploitation; all of which must be made visible before they can be unlearned.
Whether creating spaces for communal rest, publishing artist books, or developing pedagogical frameworks, I approach design as a tool for cultivating more equitable, restorative, and relational ways of world-building. I am interested in how speculative interventions can shift cultural narratives, making visible the social, political, and economic forces that shape our environments while offering tangible alternatives rooted in reciprocity, generosity, and repair.
Across my artistic and academic work, I see making as an act of world-building that asks how objects, spaces, and shared experiences might foster greater connection, generosity, and collective well-being.
Artist bio
Mallory Kimmel is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and writer whose socially engaged practice examines how design shapes systems of power, care, and belonging. Through sculpture, installation, publishing, and collaborative projects, she creates participatory works that challenge exclusionary design practices while proposing more equitable and restorative ways of inhabiting the built environment.
Kimmel's work has been exhibited nationally at venues including the U.S. State Department Inaugural Gallery, California College of the Arts, Minnesota Street Projects, The Peale Baltimore's Community Museum, George Mason University, and the University of Maryland. Her writing has appeared in E-flux, publications of The George Washington University Museum and The Textile Museum, and BmoreArt. As a curator and organizer, she has developed collaborative exhibitions and public projects with institutions including The Phillips Collection, George Mason University, Aggregate Space Gallery, and The Community College of Baltimore County.
Committed to expanding conversations around art, labor, and collective care, Kimmel founded Do Less Press, an independent publishing initiative dedicated to artist literature exploring power, labor, rest, and healing. The press has presented publications through art book fairs and zine festivals across the United States, extending her interest in publishing as a site of artistic and civic engagement.
Kimmel's practice has been recognized through residencies and fellowships with Hamiltonian Artists, The Nicholson Project, Montgomery College, The Social Studies Residency, and the Outreach Artist Residency in the Arctic Circle, supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. She also serves on the Committee on Design for the College Art Association, where she contributes to national conversations on design practice and education.
@mallory.ryan.kimmel
